when you read the doc and realized you missed something, don't say "footgun", say "aha! I misunderstood" Then if you want, set about to make things better.
Instead of jumping to "It shouldn't work this way" consider "Hmmm, why does it work this way? Is it possible that Thompson, Kernighan and Ritchie knew more about how to make a coherent straightforward system that would last 50 years in 1970 than I know how to now?"
Or perhaps you might consider that we've learned something in the last 50 years.
It sounds to me like you're hyperventilating about other people pointing out footguns. Maybe, just maybe, people in the past were capable of making mistakes. Let's not put them on a pedestal.
In fairness, they also gave us the joys of `strcpy(src_ptr, dest_ptr)` and `scanf("%s", str_ptr)`, which with the benefit of hindsight and many buffer overflows later were a terrible idea.
Instead of jumping to "It shouldn't work this way" consider "Hmmm, why does it work this way? Is it possible that Thompson, Kernighan and Ritchie knew more about how to make a coherent straightforward system that would last 50 years in 1970 than I know how to now?"