It lacks features like lambda calculus, closures, and coroutines—powerful and proven paradigms that are essential in modern programming languages. These limitations make it harder to fully embrace contemporary programming practices.
The dominance of C and its descendants has forced our systems to remain tied to its design, holding back progress. Intel tried to introduce hardware assisted garbage collection, which unfortunately failed miserably because C doesn't need it, and we are still having to cope with garbage collection entirely in software.
While I’m not suggesting we abandon C entirely (I still use it, like when writing C FFI for some projects), we need to explore new possibilities and move beyond C to better align with modern architectures and programming needs.