Depends on what you are writing. C isn't 100 percent replaceable right now but the more people bitch about it and support the alternatives, the better for the future.
Agree with the first two but the last isn't saying much. C has been an integral part of most software ever written, best, worst, and everything in between.
Ada has been a suitable replacement for C since the early 90s when GNAT was released. Prior to that there were still plenty of suitable C replacements given a little work, like Pascal and Oberon.
FYI, "apologist" is often not used to literally mean "one who apologises", but rather "one who defends"[1], with a negative connotation (at least in my experience).
I would guess the "C apologism" in the original comment is referring to defenses of C that pretend C is safe "in practice" (or "for people who know what they're doing") or minimise/ignore the strong correlation between the use of C and serious problems/vulnerabilities.
Whatever doesn't have extremely tight constraints (CPU, memory, embedded…) should probably use garbage collection. Now your language can throw a nice exception (or otherwise cleanly abort the process) before any memory corruption (and subsequent vulnerabilities) can occur.
Otherwise, I'd say try something like Rust. And if Rust doesn't make the cut, maybe go write your own C-like dialect, with less undefined behaviour.
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