Great now give me tooling of this millenium (no, I am not going back to vendor everything manually and I am not reinventing every basic data structure I wrote in University in ever project I work on) and we have a deal!
Oh, also get rid of header files, they are archaic. And I want fearless concurrency... And sum types!
If you want those things, you don't want C. Pick a reasonable higher level language you like that makes those decisions for you.
My comment was not to imply that somehow C is superior to X, Y, or Z, but rather to point out that the safety problem with C does have a practical solution.
Oh, also get rid of header files, they are archaic. And I want fearless concurrency... And sum types!