> C really isn't as great for this as is often suggested either, not for decades at least

It's good enough for undergraduate teaching. In C, you can easily explain the relation between a struct definition and its layout in memory. It's much more difficult in Caml (what's the relation between an algebraic datatype and its layout in memory?) or Java (which introduces pointers that you never asked for).

We (University of Paris-Cité) are teaching Java in first year, then C and Caml in second year, with seemingly good results.