I'm 30, and from Googling you seem to be 3 years older than me, but I don't think the use case for learning C has changed all that much over the course of my time as a programmer.
Already around '95 or so Perl was widely used, GUIs could be done in things like Tcl/Tk, basic apps were starting to move onto the web, desktop stuff was mostly in C++.
You learned C when you wanted to work on things like kernels or databases or high-performance daemons and whatnot. That's still mostly the case. Java has eaten into that a little bit, but that's not even a new phenomenon.
The things that people used C for 15 years ago are still the same things that it's used for today, and similarly, you didn't have to write stuff in C 15 years ago if you just wanted to bang out some little utility or "CGI script". I expect things to stay that way until there's some language which could reasonably replace C in its niche. Thusfar one has not emerged.
I don't know if you remember, but in 1995, Serious Software was still Not Written in "Scripting Languages". Things like SATAN and HotJava were avant-garde exceptions, and Emacs Lisp was a holdover from another era (and we often used vi instead because it was noticeably faster).
Today, I regularly use an email client written mostly in JS, message boards written entirely in Python, a chat client written in Python, a high-performance file transfer program written in Python, a music player written in C#, system monitoring tools (iotop, htop, dstat) written in Python, a version-control system written in Python, and so on. In 1995, I used an email client written in C, a newsreader written in C talking to a netnews server written in C (although early netnews servers had been partly written in sh, they were rewritten in C for performance), an IRC client written in C, file-transfer programs written in C, music players implemented in hardware, "top" written in C, version-control systems written in C (although, again, the first version of CVS was a shell script), and so on.
I don't think it's true that "basic apps were starting to move onto the web" in 1995. Web sites that were really programs with HTML user interfaces didn't really start to take off until around 1997, by my recollection. I joined eBay's AuctionWeb in 1996, but it was quite unusual (and it was promptly rewritten in, I assume, C++, as eBayISAPI.dll).
GUIs could be done in Tk, or for that matter PowerBuilder or Visual Basic, but that was thought to be "for amateurs". It became technically possible to do this kind of stuff in high-level languages then, but it took a few years for people to notice that.
Tcl was driving oil extractions plants in 1995... just an example, also there were bit perl programs in production, so for sure now the acceptance is higher but was not impossible to have sensible code written in scripting languages back then.
It wasn't impossible in 1985, either, when GNU Emacs came out; but the now-common AlternateSoftAndHardLayers approach won Emacs a reputation for being a slow memory hog.
My point, though, is that much of C's 1995 or 1996 niche is now occupied by "scripting languages", and in 1995 or 1996, that niche was occupied by C.
Very good point, I'm 34, and actually probably the average HNers is on average ten years younger than me, but well, it is pretty shocking that what you said is so true. No big shift in the latest 10/15 years, there were already good alternatives for all the higher level stuff. Thanks for opening my eyes about that!
Already around '95 or so Perl was widely used, GUIs could be done in things like Tcl/Tk, basic apps were starting to move onto the web, desktop stuff was mostly in C++.
You learned C when you wanted to work on things like kernels or databases or high-performance daemons and whatnot. That's still mostly the case. Java has eaten into that a little bit, but that's not even a new phenomenon.
The things that people used C for 15 years ago are still the same things that it's used for today, and similarly, you didn't have to write stuff in C 15 years ago if you just wanted to bang out some little utility or "CGI script". I expect things to stay that way until there's some language which could reasonably replace C in its niche. Thusfar one has not emerged.