Well, the developer saying that some times had a real point in 1978. A lot of developers migrated, some didn't, often for very good reasons. The 99% of the developers being ok with C only happened after optimizing compilers was a thing.
Of course, none of that means that the entire endeavor was worthless before that. It just means that whatever improvement you create, it won't appease to a lot of developers, and it's ok. One can only get unanimity if the change has no drawbacks at all, under no context.
The machine I learned C with maxed out at 64K data. Needless to say, the compiler was not doing much beyond peephole optimization.