I absolutely can't say that "I like C." But my journey to programming was probably a bit different than most: I started with Borland Pascal "with objects". It wasn't memory-safe, but it was type-safe enough to make making mistakes difficult, and had a very clear and obvious syntax. It also had useful OOP, and a useful module/package ("unit") management, including incremental compilation. When I had to switch to C a few years later (I don't know anyone using Pascal in production), I felt like I was going maybe 20 years backwards in time. I thought that it was just me being new to the language, but thinking back (about 30 years), it was the text-based includes, manual module and build management, text-based macros, the (back then) painfully un-useful error messages that resulted from all of that, plus the hilariously arcane, backwards type declarations --
"void (*bsd_signal(int, void (*)(int)))(int); -- you are kidding me, right?", no incremental compilation, nothing.
Basically a thin layer of syntactic sugar around assembler, but with a sometimes awkward syntax.
With C++ (again, back then) the build problems and the dependency problems didn't go away, but the error message problems got way, way worse (template errors looked like somebody barfed out partially digested XML), and the executable sizes exploded.
On the other side of this, we have python that has no syntax, but also absolutely no guard rails (because tabs vs spaces were so fun the first time around in makefiles I guess?), and execution-times (in my field) measured in days instead of minutes.
I have been making do with the current batch of languages, but I've never again had a feeling with a language that yes, it is fun and comfortable to write. It's basically "ah, whatever, it is a hammer, how comfortable does it need to be as long as the handle doesn't fly off...".