I believe your conclusion is rooted in a lack of experience in writing C code. You seem to think that developers are going to go out of their way to allocate an

I believe your conclusion is rooted in a lack of experience in writing C code. You seem to think that developers are going to go out of their way to allocate and initialize the struct manually. In almost every codebase I've worked in, struct types always have an allocation/initializer function, so I look for that first, and generally find a set of other functions that are used to work on that struct type, organized into a single .c file usually named something similar to that struct type. It is a convention, not syntactic sugar. In C++ or C#, you have syntactic sugar that makes it more difficult to violate the rule, but does not actually enforce anything.