I guess the question is, what happens to the kernel when all the people who learned on C are gone? The majority of even the brightest new devs aren't going to cut their teeth on C, and will feel the same resistance to learning a new language when they think that there are diminishing returns to be had compared to what's new and modern and, most importantly, familiar.

I honestly get the hostility, the fast pace of technology has left a lot of older devs being seen as undesirable because the don't know the new stuff, even if their fundamental understanding of low level languages could be a huge asset. Their knowledge of C is vast and valuable, and they're working on a project that thrives because of it. To have new people come to the project and say "Yeah, we could do this without having to worry about all that stuff" feels like throwing away a lot of the skill they've built. I'm not sure what the solution is, I really don't think there are enough new C developers in the world to keep the project going strong into the future though. Maybe a fork is just the way to go; time will tell which is more sustainable.