Your reasoning for learning C is biased (perhaps you don't know it well as you suggested the others to know the basics)! At the end, hardware understands only values. C is a minimal, efficient and readable language which survived for decades although there are hundreds of other programming languages. It remains an active programming language as long as there is a good compiler support.

Many of the complaints I read about C these days often boil down to a lack of understanding, I think you're right to suggest that the author doesn't know it very well. I also suspect that they haven't taken the time to find and read good C code.