The chief problem with the idea that C "accurately models how the computer actually works", as you allude to but don't go into detail, is that modern CPUs work

The chief problem with the idea that C "accurately models how the computer actually works", as you allude to but don't go into detail, is that modern CPUs work nothing like the CPUs that C is accustomed to. Between out of order execution, hyperthreading, caches, prefetching, pretending-to-be-uniform-memory-access-but-not-actually-being-it and concurrency the degree to which C's computer model is relevant is rapidly shrinking. We don't really have a good model for this, but that's not really a good excuse to keep writing new languages based on C.