Rust is the first language that fixes all of these things, can be used as a replacement for all of C's use cases (including ABI-stable libraries, kernels, etc.), and has a sufficient community / mindshare that you can expect libraries to exist in the language for functionality that you generally expect to find in libraries.
Maybe we should be embarrassed as an industry that it took us 20 years to get there, yes.
Maybe we should be embarrassed as an industry that it took us 20 years to get there, yes.