alt Hacker NewsAuthor here. Not quite. The key idea is about using a union to associate type information with a generic data type. Type casting a function is not the only way to use that type information. I discuss that as well as the C23 changes in the footnotes and the "typeof on old compilers" section.
FWIW, as far back as 2015 my feature check library documents Visual Studio as supporting "__typeof".[1] Note the leading but not trailing underscores. Perhaps I was mistaken, but I usually tested that sort of thing. It's also possible __typeof had slightly different semantics.
[1] See https://github.com/wahern/autoguess/blob/b44556e4/config.h.g... (that's the 2015 revision, but HEAD has the same code).