This discussion is rather moot. At some point somebody is going to tell us we all need this in order not to hurt ourselves while eating:
The point is not whether a programmer hurts themselves with their tool, it is whether they hurt
other people, e.g. the people that use the program directly or indirectly. And there are many many
many examples of people being "disadvantaged" by programs written in C/C++ due any of the many many
many reasons they can cause nasal daemons to appear at the least convenient moment.
I first used C professionally in 1981, for a hard realtime system. I think I have a better appreciation of its strengths and weaknesses than many young programmers, and know when it is and isn't the most appropriate tool. Claims of "better efficiency" (whatever that might mean) are pretty naive from several angles.
If you want to consider one of the more surprising ways of improving C's performance on benchmarks on machine X, don't run optimised output, but do run non-optimised postprocessed output on an
emulation of machine X. Yup, emulation can make it faster
See HP's experimental Dynamo compiler for the numerical results.