I think the only meaningful benefit here is performance.

Simplicity is at best determined by the nature of the problem and at worst a completely subjective opinion for C.

Similarly, static typing is not usually something the programmer should care about that much. You need to know which paradigm your language uses, of course, but beyond that it does not matter all that much. IMX, you're more concerned with type safety, and C is not fully type safe like, say, Java is.