You're alluding to the network effects that make that takeover difficult now, after decades of doubling down on a technically weak and systemically insecure solution.

Languages that are technically capable of replacing C in all those applications include Ada, (and in certain applications, SPARK Ada), D, Zig, Rust, and the Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon family. None of those language use a purely textual preprocessor like C's. They all fix many of C's other design weaknesses that were excusable in the 1970s, but really aren't today.

But Rust in the Linux kernel is no longer experimental, so perhaps things are starting to improve.