Sure. Whatever. You could run Pascal on your CDC mainframe before you could run C on your PDP/11. Meanwhile PL/1 had pointers (I think. Hard to separate "original" from the versions I actually used) and Bliss (DEC's high level systems programming language) had ONLY pointers (!)
Turbo-Pascal pre-dated Turbo-C on the PC, too.
Early C compilers were pretty sucky until the late 80s.
Meanwhile, everyone programmed in Fortran, Cobol, or Assembly language. Outside of niches. I don't think assembly language programmers have any trouble with pointers; they're inherent in implementing any sort of array in a low-level language...