Well, for a modern approach to development in C, you may have to be creative and not rely on ready examples, but it's still doable. A lot of the C issues are at the "conventional" level and can be solved if you just do things a little bit differently (e.g. nothing stops you from modularising source/headers files even though C doesn’t enforce this at the language level).

I can understand the "ergonomics" you speak of in Rust but it's not very surprising in that aspect especially given that C faces same challenge (and is even more verbose). The GObject system seems to map well with languages that favour the OOP style (built-in classes, inheritance etc) like Python. So yeah, on that, I understand ;)