There's no amount of simplification that'll free you from the need to manually check and handle/propagate errors or deallocate resources in C. You might be able to reduce the amount of code you need to write, but it's still several lines of C versus one line of something else - and if you make a mistake or even forget something in those several lines, things will often compile and run fine, but you'll have memory leaks or sporadic crashes.
Unless you're writing "hello world" level software, the best you can say about any significant amount of code written in C is that you don't know about any such issues in it.
If you try to write the same complicated mess in C as you would in any other language it's going to hurt.
Not having a package manager can be a blessing, depends on your perspective.