I think I'd have guessed similarly, but then I read the data.
I don't think a C dialect is a good idea. You want a blank slate, on which you can begin with your foundational concerns (e.g. constant time evaluation) rather than starting from C. There may be practical reasons to prefer how C spells things, the way Rust looks like a semi-colon language even though it's mostly an ML, but the core language isn't helpful.
The C dialect idea would be useful if you wanted to gradually take a code base in. You’d mark parts of it as unsafe/unchecked and new code could come in using the new constructs with a more convenient syntax.
I don't think a C dialect is a good idea. You want a blank slate, on which you can begin with your foundational concerns (e.g. constant time evaluation) rather than starting from C. There may be practical reasons to prefer how C spells things, the way Rust looks like a semi-colon language even though it's mostly an ML, but the core language isn't helpful.