Not really desperation, it's just easier. Sometimes this is where perf doesn't matter, any choice would be fine, a linked list of the up to 4 Doodads won't be m

Not really desperation, it's just easier. Sometimes this is where perf doesn't matter, any choice would be fine, a linked list of the up to 4 Doodads won't be meaningfully worse or better than a growable array of the 4 Doodads, or I dunno, a HashMap from index to each of the four Doodads. Stop worrying about it and focus on the real problem. In larger C software sometimes a use of linked lists is costing meaningful performance and a growable array type would be a huge win - but the other side of the coin is that sometimes in these perf critical environments a linked list actually is the right choice, and a C programmer might luck into that since it was the first tool to hand while say a C++ or Rust programmer might take longer to realise that this data structure is the best option.