I think stability plays a big role in C continuing to remain dominant. Rust and Zig arent there yet, and wrt Rust in particular the ownership model doesn't play nearly as nicely in non-deterministic environments (taking far more code to deal with hardware such as an external display or printer that might, for example, get randomly unplugged at any point in time works against the grain of a static memory ownership analysis).
I'd say it's a good example why more static checks like lifetimes are useful.
With them, you can at least tell apart data structures that are fleeting and can disappear when a cable is ejected, and those which should stay put. This likely might help avoid another double-free or another freed pointer dereference.
