A possible outcome is that you would trade pointer bugs etc. for "Java bugs" if Java embedded were used everywhere. Embedding a complete runtime increases the attack surface alot.
Many of those Java exploits are on C and C++ written code layer, yet another reason to get rid of them in security critical code.
According to Microsoft Security Research Center and Google's driven Linux Kernel Self Protection project, the industry losses due to memory corruptions in C written software goes up to billions of dollars per year.
Then, unless we are speaking about a non-conformant ISO C implementation for bare metal deployments, it provides the initialization before main() starts, floating point emulation, handling of signals on non-UNIX OSes, VLAs.
How Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony, ARM are now steering the industry regarding their OS SDKs has already proven who is on the right side.
I have been at this since the BBS days, I don't care about Internet brownie points.
The only thing left is actually having some liabily in place for business damages caused by exploits, I am fairly confident that it will eventually happen, even if it takes a couple of more years or decades to arrive there.
Claiming that a little process startup code (that isn't really part of a particular language, but is much more part of the OS ABI) was easier to exploit than an entire JRE is just dishonest.
I would never think of "floating point emulation, handling of signals on non-UNIX OSes, VLAs" as anything resembling a "runtime". These are mostly irrelevant anyway, but apart from that they are just little library nuggets or a few assembly instructions that get inserted as part of the regular compilation.
By "runtime", I believe most people mean a runtime system (like the JRE), and that is an entirely different world. It runs your "compiled" byte code because that can't run on its own.
I care about computer science definitions, not what most people think.
Dishonest is selling C to write any kind of quality software, specially anything conected to the Internet, unless one's metrics about quality are very low.
Unfortunately liability is not yet a thing across the industry.