Well I mean Java is terrible.  Most programmers I know hate Java, and most often the person defending it doesn't do programming in the tech sense, they do programming somewhere where the point is to be all enterprise and the code is considered boring and unimportant.  That's not universally true, but to be frank "I hate java" is something I use as an indicator of someone who is or will eventually be a good programmer.  I think maybe I've even talked about this somewhere in this thread already, but Java intentionally punishes the skilled programmer in order to make sure that the new programmer can't do things so badly wrong that it's unmanageable.  Then it fails at doing exactly that, kind of, but eh.  It's from the school of programming language design that wants to be able to throw an army of fresh college grads at a problem rather than a few skilled people and is willing to punish the skilled people to make that happen.

But unless you want to go into low-level coding C is a waste of your time.  It's the only language I know of where you have to script your build process.  It's 10 to 50 times harder than using something else in practice.  That said if you do go into lower level coding it's worth a  lot of money.

I currently do C and Rust.  Rust isn't exactly low-level, it's complicated, but it's not high level either.  99% of the world's software is written in something else, but most of the world's most important software is C/C++ and that won't change anytime soon.  Being able to handle it was and is my continuing path to frankly absurd amounts of money.  My most recent project which is public enough that I can talk about it is a thing that has to be able to handle hundreds of millions of requests a day in order to collect app analytics, and for something like that it's a low-level native language or it's "we're spending an additional $50000 on servers" so you don't have a choice really.  The Python/JS/etc stuff can make frankly ridiculous amounts of money too, and in terms of available positions it's probably about the same.  But C is a valid choice.  It's just the kind of valid choice where you're not going to be doing audiogames or something along the way, and need to go do stuff like contribute to the Linux kernel or something, and it is a very much harder path.  But in addition to the job security, your knowledge won't be outdated for at least 20 years.

But in any case: your choices are learn CMake and SDL, and maybe some C++ so that you have conveniences that C doesn't offer.  Or, well, not do that.  And which I think you should do depends a lot on whether you're doing C because it's interesting and you like where the career goes, or not.  Consider that (at least as far as I know) you've been doing this for months and your projects still aren't bigger than one file.  There is always a price to pay when learning programming.  The price of Python/JS and the like is that you will learn them quickly, then stagnate in your career for a while and have to spend a bunch of time learning some other tech like postgres and kubernetes to justify paying you more/moving up the ladder.  The price of C is that you have a massively huge learning cliff at the beginning that you have to climb over, if you will, and you're not going to put out a bunch of software along the way while you learn it because it's hard.