I think the saving grace is that you never actually see the C (it’s piped straight in to GCC), so it might as well not exist. C GObject code has a lot of boilerplate and I like to think that Vala is the programming language that GTK programmers are actually thinking in when they write their C. Vala is essentially a compression of the C code with less room for errors.

I definitely recommend using Vala for Gtk as it was tailor made for it. It’s built on top of the object system that Gtk uses so the API fits in to the language flawlessly, unlike Rust. It even has its own website for browsing the Gnome APIs https://valadoc.org/