In the case of strings it's because in practice it's just not that much of a problem. If your not in a highly constrained environment you'd just use one of seve

In the case of strings it's because in practice it's just not that much of a problem. If your not in a highly constrained environment you'd just use one of several libraries like glib that have strings and other stuff you'd typically find in the standard libraries of other languages. These libraries have the freedom evolve faster, break backward compatibility, not have to worry about committee design and keeping everyone happy, limit themselves to certain classes of machines and do all sorts of things you can't in a standard library. C has an anemic standard library but many libraries you can use as your standard, this keeps everyone happy. I'd expect the javascript/npm world to evolve this way in future.