The entire premise of "complete breakage" and "nightmare" is unrealistic. No competently architected project universally includes select(2). There is no reason

The entire premise of "complete breakage" and "nightmare" is unrealistic. No competently architected project universally includes select(2). There is no reason to have random invocations of the call all over the place. Are you prepared to setup the timing, signals, the fully elaborated errno switch handling every error, including finding a bad file descriptor on EBADF to toss for a reinvocation, or how to continue after EINTR all to make this expensive (and de facto deprecated) system call which generally forms a single blocking point deep in a program's core event loop willy nilly like it's some kind of strlcpy()? No, you're not. Frankly I've never seen select(2) properly invoked in more than one place in an entire project, and neither have you. That's why a C professional isn't really phased. Sure, there are about a million english words in the OED and some more creativity would be fantastic. This still isn't a problem, on the facts. It's not an opinion.