The languages I mentioned all got generics during their lifetime, so yeah they were all more powerful than C.
C won due to UNIX, had UNIX not been a kind of free beer that companies could build their workstations with and universities avoid paying for commercial OSes like VMS, history would have taken a different path.
Also, lisp has pretty much always been more powerful than C. But what zig brings to the table is an extremely simple language which is also very powerful. Much of the power results from the entire language being available at compile time. You seem so ready to throw that away in favor of could-have-been nostalgia, I wonder if you've taken the time to understand what you're criticizing.
I was quite clear that compile-time type reflection was the only thing missing.
Zig isn't the only AOT compiled language with compile-time type reflection in 2021, and exactly because of could-have-been nostalgia, we don't need newer systems programming languages that don't have an answer for use-after-free in safe code.
C won due to UNIX, had UNIX not been a kind of free beer that companies could build their workstations with and universities avoid paying for commercial OSes like VMS, history would have taken a different path.