Mono yes, but .NET Core only released a few years ago, so I don't really count that.

> People want a replacement because C suffers from the problem of being too simple yet difficult to use effectively (need to grasp pointers, learn how data is managed, etc.)

And none of these are that difficult to learn honestly.
Like so many people fear the lack of a garbage collector, even though it's basically just making use of the "free" command, just don't forget to call it before the end of the program.

Correct PHP even requires you to unset (the PHP counterpart for "free") variables, close SQL connections, use fclose if you use files, and so on, but very few PHP devs do so, and then they wonder why the memory usage is growing, and why they get DDoS'd.

So instead of learning to code properly, they resort to bloat like Cuckflare/Fastly and frameworks like Laravel/Symphony/CakePHP/whatever.

Because PHP is technically just a C framework for web development, very few people realize this, so they often make frameworks inside of frameworks inside of frameworks inside of frameworks inside of frameworks inside of frameworks inside of frameworks, and then they wonder why PHP sucks...