Remember that C's contemporary languages were either inefficient (e.g. ALGOL 68, PL/1, Lisp), functionally obsolete (e.g. FORTRAN didn't have recursion or heap allocation), or even lower level (Assembly, B). C eliminated the need for need for assembly in programs that were low level (like OS kernels) or high performance (math, graphics, signal processing), and that was surely a huge improvement in type safety and expressiveness.
Well, Basic and Pascal was already something I guess, and Modula arrived in the same "era" as C. So at a general level the weight of C is to my mind not so much due to how it was shining out of the crowd of its alternative options for general programming. Instead my perception is that it's mostly due to a conjunction of where it was born (Bell Labs), its initial focus on construction of low level layer parts (kernel/OS), and how software stacks tends to leak.
That doesn't void completely what C achieved at a technical level, of course. But it certainly ponder differently how much its spread can be weighted on its technical benefits.
