I've spent hours debugging a memory alignment issues. Its not fun. The problem is that you don't know (at first) the full space of UB. So you spend the first 10 years of programming suffering through all kinds of weird UBs and then at the end of the pipeline claims "pftt, just git gud at it. C is perfect!".
Maybe I got lucky, because on my first C job I got told to make sure to stick to ISO C (by which they probably mostly meant not to use compiler-specific extensions), so I got down the rabbit hole of reading up on the ISO specification and on what it does and doesn’t guarantee.
Making sure you have no UB certainly slows you down considerably, and I strongly prefer languages that can catch all non-defined behavior statically for sure, but I don’t find C to be unmanageable.
Memory alignment issues only happen when you cast pointers from the middle of raw memory to/from other types, which, yes, is dangerous territory, and you have to know what you are doing there.
