They are mostly reliable (though probably still full of security holes) despite C—made possible by the millions of person-hours thrown at the problem of maintaining large C codebases.

Back then, we had no choice. We can do better.

Essentially all but the most used code-paths with be bug riddled. This paper [1] on finding bugs in C compilers by fuzzing is an interesting case-study.

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4241

Server programming isn't even that hard. You could do it in C all day. (Just have good sandboxing for when someone finds an exploit...)

Millions of people have been writing C for games, firmware, computer systems without Internet since the 80s on, and they didn't even get software updates. If your server crashes you get a coredump and you can update anytime you want.

s/isn't possible to write correctly/is difficult to write correctly cheaply in non-trivial applications/

and you pretty much have it. Building higher-level abstractions has historically been a good thing, unless your day job is punching in opcodes.

I was more poking fun at the hyperbole that it's not possible to hire anyone who writes C at a reasonable rate.

That's basically true.