By the same token, the lack of higher level abstractions in C also add up in time and mental effort, and you're more likely to end up, in my experience, writing a dumber and more dangerous algorithm than you would in a language that has better safety features and more powerful abstractions.
But I think the main issue is that "new" people don't realize most of their beloved languages aren't self hosted and are C compiled and/or that they're calling the C library for almost everything.
Thus, knowing C matters a whole lot. Using it is another matter, and albeit the flexibility of C makes programs a lot more efficient every single time (when you have time and skill), it's understandable to use other languages.
Still, some tasks should still be done in C instead of starting one of these countless runtime of the new language on the block. I'm slightly tired of the huge interpreted programs running extremely slower than they should these days. Even thus the hardware has gone way faster we still manage to reproduce 10y old programs that run slower than they did when we first made them.
