I’m totally with you on this.
C is a fantastic language for people who want to develop for existing C projects. But there are very few reasons to develop new software projects in C today. As such, for anyone learning C, the best first project would probably be whatever existing C project you want to work on.
Maybe the main exception to that is probably embedded systems stuff for microcontrollers and the like, but I don’t know enough about that space to say whether that is even still the case or whether you’d be better off with something else.
Turns out NVidia is already doing just that (to OEMs, that is).
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-reportedly-no-longer-supplying-vram-to-its-gpu-board-partners-in-response-to-memory-crunch-rumor-claims-vendors-will-only-get-the-die-forced-to-source-memory-on-their-own