The tone of this article is a bit combative and incurious for my taste. If you want to understand "how a computer works" - well sure C has gone from low-level

The tone of this article is a bit combative and incurious for my taste. If you want to understand "how a computer works" - well sure C has gone from low-level to a high-level language. But the model of "how a computer works" - from Python or Ruby or JavaScript - that's very often expressed in C: kernels and libraries, in multiple layers. There's so much rich information in C code bases on why something behaves like it does. Whole histories of computing are expressed in C - types and APIs that tell you why something might work on one computer and not on another. So sure, don't learn C if you don't need to, but it's not hard to understand if you're motivated. And it really does expose you to how a computer works in ways you won't find in higher-level languages.