tell me where working with strings is not miserable? Practically, modern languages with RAII make it easy at the cost of perfomance (doing a lot of allocations). So, if you doing lot of string handling, you still need to think how to do it in performant way. If doing it a bit - why care about miserable.

To be fair, the HTML and CSS in C wasn't too bad.. the Youtube scraper was also written in C and that was a lot more painful :)

Emitting strings is fine, it's the parsing that sucks.

If you do it with the string functions from the standard library then yes, it is.