The thing we are still trying to add back into C, 50 years later.
Many, who don't study or know of the history, can get sucked into the rhetoric of C as the "superior language" versus the reality of it being a heavily corporate pushed language. Pascal was in the way, so got hammered by bad press. Same sort of thing happens today, in these weird programming language scuffles. Rust, Zig, Vlang, Dlang, Odin, C3, etc... If a competitor is in the way, strange one-sided and highly critical blogs can materialize.
By 1987, pretty much any of Kernighan's criticisms involving Pascal and derivatives were moot. But he never retracted or modified what he got wrong or had changed. He had many years to do so. That was before the 2nd edition of his book (The C programming language in 1988). And before ANSI C (1989). Turbo Pascal and Object Pascal were out, which both took lessons from Modula-2, and were widely known successes.