I think one of the problems with C today, which you're touching on but I think not quite capturing, is that it's not taught and used nearly as much anymore. So when people are found in the position of writing, or more likely altering existing C, they usually don't know popular styles, conventions, coping mechanisms; eg. you can use coding style to make memory leaks less likely [one example: a rule forbidding early return out of a function, designating cleanup blocks], but few people are learning or teaching it.
I fully agree than most of problems of C can be mitigated with good training. It it of course far easier to blame the language than admit that there is a skill issue. The story that this a language full of footguns that even experienced programmers can not deal with is a lot of nonsense in my opinion and does not match my experience (both as a C programmer, a manager of C programmers, and user of many rock-solid C programs). At the same time, does it help to complain about insufficient training? It is just reality that many programmers are not experienced in C and it is also true that there are a lot of serious problems in C code. This is not a contradiction. If you have C coders without sufficient training and/or experience you will get memory safety issues in C code and you will not even notice in time. If you have unexperienced Rust coders, you will still get memory safe code - at least if you have a rule against using "unsafe" or some oversight. (the code might be buggy in others ways, or programmers may be less efficient, but you still get memory safety ensured by the language). I think this is the real great advantage that Rust has and why we should also have a memory-safe subset of C.
