Motivation is something that's hard to grasp, I can certainly see that that's something easier to maintain with a higher level language like Python.
When I recommend C over Python, it's not to say that you can't write efficient stuff in high level languages, but do so you will still need to understand quite well what it is that those high level languages are actually doing underneath all the stuff. Unity, for example, is a good example for this. For a long time devs had to basically write their own memory allocation to get decent and reliable real time performance from it, to avoid that very typical stuttery experience that used to define the engine, surely due to garbage collection artefacts. This shows that you can, with enough engineering effort, do next to anything on any system. But I feel to actually understand what goes on behind the scenes when your program, for example, tries to create some complex data structures, I think that's much easier on C. And I think Minecraft is actually an example that proves my argument, as they needed to rewrite the entire engine into C++ to get it running on more systems and implement more complex effects like RT on it. All of which could have been done in the original Java version, for sure, but getting it running fast and reliably, would have been a huge effort, to the point that just going to C/C++ proved a more sensible choice.
I don't want to come off as elitist, there are certainly different kinds of philosophies when it comes to how to teach programming, and surely there's no point in learning low-level stuff if you don't want to become a professional programmer, but merely learn your way around some effective scripting languages.