Exactly. There is a lot happening implicitly in a C program that the programmer has to be aware of and keep in mind. And it’s made worse by valid compile implementation choices. I remember chasing a bug for a day that was based on me forgetting that the particular implementation I was working with had signed characters and was sign extending something at an inopportune time.
As someone who has had to parse C syntax for a living, I'd argue that it's not syntactically simple either. (Declarators are particularly nasty in C and even more so in C++).
Syntactically, yes. Semantically, no.
There are languages with tons of "features" with far, far less semantic overhead than C.
https://blog.regehr.org/archives/767
FWIW, writing programs in C has been my day job for a long time.