Out of interest, why would people laugh at someone learning C? I know plenty of people using C in all manner of domains, choosing it over C++ or Rust for fair and sensible reasons - I'm not a C person myself, but it certainly seems extremely useful to have in the toolkit!
I want to learn C not (only) because I think it's useful, but because I think I might like it. I have a particular interpreted language that I like, enjoy and know inside out, now I want to know a compiled one in a similar way.
To answer your question: I get the impression from various tech news on "hot new languages" that C is the incumbent systems language that people put up with but don't really love, and yet I want to try and love it. I've developed a taste for minimalism, simplicity and a degree of brevity in programming, I have a feeling I might find C more suited to me than C++, Rust, Go, Java etc for this reason despite the lack of "modern" features.
I've noticed this a lot on hackernews, there is an apprehesion to say certain things as though there is some sort of pedigree or gating when discussing topics, especially when it's personal...there isn't.
I started coding 10 years ago (damn I just figured that...) learning C at my engineering school for 2 years. Never had to use it ever since (mostly working front-end and webAPIs) but I'm still glad I studied it to learn the programming foundations.
I would probably choose Rust or Go today though.
I suppose because of the perception that many programmers already know C. Which is true, but only some fraction know it well, which is far more important in C than in most modern languages.
There are plenty of reasons to still learn C even if better alternatives exist for most new projects. There’s so much important software out there in C (and C++), for example the Linux kernel.
