Some of those are regular modern C features and definitely should be used, most importantly compound literals and designated init, since they make the code both

Some of those are regular modern C features and definitely should be used, most importantly compound literals and designated init, since they make the code both safer and more readable (and I blame the Visual Studio compiler team for dragging their asses for 16 years to support at least a subset of C99 for those features to be 'lesser known').