No, those things are not a complexity of C. They're just complex to implement at a lower level. They're complicated in any language, often, if approached at the level C provides. You have to hand-hold the machine through it. A C-like implementation of linked lists in an array of memory using pointers, for example, looks just as bad if written in that way in unsafe {} Rust, or even some mutating thing in Haskell. You can do that if you want, but you don't have to. Those languages allow you to abstract that away very quickly (often already pre-abstracted for you with default approaches). That's what people mean when they say C is simple. Plain and simple. Minimal. You have to do much of the heavy lifting.
Respectfully disagree. A language that fails to adequately provide safeguards to a user is a complex language because it forces all the complexity of dealing with the underlying machine onto the user. These are things a user needs to know to be effective in the language, which in turn makes using the language complex. It's a deceptively simple language.
C is complex because of what it doesn't do, not what it does. That's IMO worse.
It's not so much that we're disagreeing as arguing different points about the language, I think. You are right that it is not a simple language to use, in many ways. Archaic, unnecessarily complicated to implement many standard approaches, and very repetitive. The header system is just the wrong approach. Etc. I wouldn't pick it for the main language for a new project, if at all avoidable personally.
It's very easy to implement, though. A compiler fits in 32 kilobytes of RAM on some architectures. Only a handful of control structures. Limited types. That's the sense of simple that I meant, and which most people meant. It's not a compliment. It's a neutral observation. It's actually C's greatest weakness. It's too simple.
