It gets a lot of hate because the majority of developers are not embedded developers, kernel developers, or doing anything involving hardware. The other reason, IMO, is that to do anything that's actually kinda cool or fun in C you have to get pretty adept, so it's probably just written off as an old, boring language.
Personally I'm in my mid-20s and quite enjoy working in C. And for things like bit manipulation it's much easier than in higher level languages. I suspect at some point even the smallest MCUs will be able to run Rust or Go, but until that happens there is still a place for C/C++. Haters can hate but that won't change the fact that C is still the most widely supported language for embedded platforms (and Linux, the other elephant in the room).
Personally I'm in my mid-20s and quite enjoy working in C. And for things like bit manipulation it's much easier than in higher level languages. I suspect at some point even the smallest MCUs will be able to run Rust or Go, but until that happens there is still a place for C/C++. Haters can hate but that won't change the fact that C is still the most widely supported language for embedded platforms (and Linux, the other elephant in the room).