I'm well aware... but still, when I see new software written in C when there are so many languages available (which was not the case when Linus started writing Linux) it's amazing to me, both because they can actually do it (I definitely don't have the discipline to pull it off, spoiled too much by high level languages) and because they didn't just choose to use something easier like Go or even Java.

C isn't that hard; you certainly have to approach things in a pretty different way, and it does have a slower curve to productivity, but once you get past the hurdle of having less abstraction (i.e. mostly by just not making pointless abstractions, and having general utilities for the cases you do need some) and learn "gdb -ex r ./program <enter> [wait for crash] bt <enter>" to get a stacktrace, it's, give or take, usable.