I wonder if it would have been possible for C to have been less pointer heavy without killing performance on those old systems. Could we have done without poin

I wonder if it would have been possible for C to have been less pointer heavy without killing performance on those old systems. Could we have done without pointer arithmetic? Could we have hidden the pointer part of function pointers and made them syntactically just like Python or JS functions? Did arrays as raw blocks of memory ever need to exist? I remember when I first learned C, I didn't really see the problem, I thought it was a perfectly fine language, until I learned Python/JS/C++/Dart and saw how nice high level features and package management is. But now I wonder how I ever used it at all without complaining!