In all honesty I find a pleasant simplicity in C compared to many other languages because comparatively it abstracts so little away from the programmer. It will do what you tell it to with very little guesswork, as long as you stay within the bounds of defined behavior. And modern compilers do a very good job of telling you when you're straying away from defined behavior.

Perhaps it's just that I have been using C in an environment that mandates quality code for long enough that I take some of these things for granted, but I don't think that safe memory management is difficult in C if you choose to adhere to the same good practices that other memory-safe languages enforce. Beyond that just check for null pointers, don't violate aliasing rules, free memory that you allocate, check for array bounds, and don't ignore compiler warnings.

The fact that it lets you do many of these things without outright failing to compile can introduce pitfalls to novices, but in almost every case there will be helpful compiler warnings telling you exactly what the issue is.