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> the interface to userspace is universally written in assembly.

Which by some eery coincidence happens to conform to the C ABI of the platform. Come on.

The point is that it has a C interface despite being written in assembly. Your original post said the only reason it had a C interface was that it was written in C.
My original sentence was "Operating systems are currently written in C, and therefore have a C interface."

I stand by that claim: the only reason operating systems have a C interface is because they are (at least originally) written in C. The fact that the kernel has some parts in assembly is immaterial, even if those parts happen to comprise the userland interface.

And it's not just the kernel: when UNIX was re-written in C, everything was written in C. The compiler, the core utilities, the editor, the shell… the whole OS, not just the kernel. Of course it was easier to interface to that in the same language everything else was written in.

Likewise, the Oberon operating system, which was written almost entirely in the Oberon language (which should have been named Pascal-3) has an… Oberon interface. Want to use C to interface with it? My, you'd have to write a whole compiler, perhaps a non-trivial runtime, debugging tools, and of course an FFI to interface to Oberon, the de-facto linga franca.

C looks much worse when it's not already the king of the hill. Its strength lies in its ubiquity more than in any quality of the language itself.