Is it just me or there an elephant in the room no one is talking about?

To me, so much blame lies with C's arcane rules, in this case for forcing you to declare variables earlier than you need them. If the compiler hadn't complained pointlessly and just let the programmer declare variables where they're needed, people wouldn't have had to try to "fix" it to begin with.

Apparently people would prefer to blame the kernel developers than the immaculate language that is C though...