C is not how a computer truly works.

If you want to know how computers work, learn assembly and circuit design. You can learn C without ever thinking about registers, register allocation, the program counter, etc.

Although you can learn assembly without ever learning about e.g. branch prediction. There's tons of levels of abstraction in computers, and many of the lower level ones try to pretend you've still got a computer from the 80s even though CPUs are a lot more complex than they used to be.

As an aside, I've anecdotally heard of some schools teaching Rust instead of C as a systems language in courses. Rust has a different model than C, but will still teach you about static memory vs the stack vs the heap, pointers, etc.

Honestly, if I had to write some systems software, I'd be way more confident in any Rust code I wrote than C/C++ code. Nasal demons scare me.