I spent about two decades getting paid to write C before I learned Rust so I feel confident describing myself as an expert. It's true that C's abstract machine is a much stranger thing than many of its proponents believe - and that it's not very like any computer built this century so that the "portable assembler" claims are plain delusional, but I will say it's definitely less crazy than C++, more sane if you will.

This has become a bit less true in C17 and C23, but a lot of that is driven by the urge from WG21 (the C++ committee) to have WG14 (C language) do their work for them, hopefully some WG14 members will push back against that.