When you’re working at a real systems level c is so much easier to get up and running with. These are hard problems and getting something just to a working stage can be a real challenge. C is also really simple in comparison to those mentioned, and there are a lot of people that enjoy working with c/asm.

Zig is not stable and will not be for sometime. It has a few quirks that bother me, but I look forward to using it more seriously once they release 1.0.

Rust is a different style of programming, that’s not a bad thing, but you can’t fault someone for not liking it. I think it’s great that a lot of people really like rust, that’s awesome, but it’s not perfect. It doesn’t help that there’s a lot of condescension towards other languages coming from rust zealots.

Go’s GC makes it a non starter in certain domains.

C ‘package management’ isn’t that difficult once you understand the tooling, and there’s a lot of freedom that you come to appreciate when you’re writing a driver, bootloader, porting to a custom/exotic os, etc. clangd works fantastically so it’s not lacking lsp goodies.

Real systems programming is a much smaller field than other disciplines so it does not surprise me that programmers as a whole don’t understand what makes c great.