From a popularity / use point of view, C has always been weird.
Computer scientists have a love-hate relationship with it. Systems people used to love it, while language people used to hate it, but both statements are over-generalizations. Today, most CS college programs no longer use it as the primary language of instruction.
Until the early 2000s, there were more programmers working on COBOL, and far more production code written in COBOL, compared to C. But those are typically not the people you'd find on what today is Reddit (and back then was Usenet or BBSes). Matter-of-fact, until the early 90s, most of the COBOL programmers in the world probably had no e-mail addresses that were accessible outside their company. In the late 90s or early 2000s, I saw a study by Stanford software engineering researchers about what the largest software engineering companies were (counting by number of software engineers employed). Numbers 1...3 were General Electric, General Motors, and Boing (with the first two tied for place one). The rest of the top 10 were industrial and financial companies, with the largest banks also represented. The only "computer" company in the top 10 was IBM, driven there by its large army of contract programmers who work for IBM's consulting customers. The largest "hip and trendy" computer company (which sold software) was Microsoft, somewhere in place 30 or 50. Given that all the large business/industry/finance companies DO NOT write software in C mostly, it is clear that C (and then quickly C++) was a minor player, except among OS implementers.
If I look at today's studies, I find that Javascript, Python, and several others all beat C in both popularity (how much they are talked about) and in the number of engineers specializing in them.
C's accomplishment is that it unified the OS implementation language, for the period roughly from the 90s to right now (when other languages are beginning to take over in OSes, in particular Rust). In the same fashion as COBOL and Fortran unified the business and scientific programming world for the most part. And when I say "OS", that includes the big infrastructure applications, such as web servers, FOSS databases, compilers. From there, C took a significant fraction (but never quite dominant) of industrial and web programming, and shrink-wrap consumer software; but it never was a major player in end user software, and that's where much of programming in the real world happens.