I don't disagree with what you're saying, but whatever (little) type safety C has can still be put to good use for the purposes of the article. The problem he's

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but whatever (little) type safety C has can still be put to good use for the purposes of the article. The problem he's outlining is that you have two kinds of strings: "clean" strings and "tainted" strings, and you can only get a "clean" string from some kind of escaping function that returns "clean" strings. That's the typical problem you solve with types, and it's been true forever, even in old versions of C.