it does seem like a language with a massive threshold for beginners.

Programming with manual memory management should be (comparatively) hard. It's not where beginners should start. C makes it far too easy to write code with objectively bad effects on the system, as evidenced by the countless vulnerabilities discovered in critical real-world systems over the last half-century.

after a few rounds with that compiler.

I find this phrasing curious. Do you feel that you are fighting the compiler?