C will end when our entire technological civilization collapses and has to start over from scratch and even then after a century of progress they will invent C again.
C isn't a bad language per-se, it just doesn't have an opinion on most things and I think that's exactly the reason why it survived many higher level (and more opinionated) languages that also already existed when C was created.
This is exactly right. The trend is towards comprehensive programming frameworks for convenient programming with batteries included. I hope this trend dies and we focus more on integration into the overall ecosystem again.
I haven't ever had to do anything serious in C but it's hard to imagine getting it 100% right.
A while back I wrote some C code to do the "short-bread" problem (it's a bit of a tradition at work to give it to people as their first task, though in Python it's a lot easier). Implementing a deque using all of the modern guard rails and a single file unit test framework still took me a lot of attempts.
Nowadays, not so much. Computers are multiple orders of magnitude faster, have multiple orders of magnitude more memory and storage and do things multiple orders of magnitude more complex than they used to. Portable assembly still has its uses obviously, but safer/easier/faster alternatives exist in all its niches.
C is much closer to any other high level language than it is to assembly. 'Portable assembly' might have been true with trivial C compilers of the 70s and 80s, but not with compilers like gcc or clang.
