Yeah, kids like to waste time to make C more safe or bring C++ features. If you need them, use C++ or different language. Those examples make code look ugly and you are right, the corner cases.
If you need to cleanup stuff on early return paths, use goto.. Its nothing wrong with it, jump to end when you do all the cleanup and return. Temporary buffers? if they arent big, dont be afraid to use static char buf[64]; No need to waste time for malloc() and free. They are big? preallocate early and reallocate or work on chunk sizes. Simple and effective.
> static char buf[64];
In a function? That makes the function not-threadsafe and the function itself stateful. There are places, where you want this, but I would refrain from doing that in the general case.
God forbid we should make it easier to maintain the existing enormous C code base we’re saddled with, or give devs new optional ways to avoid specific footguns.
> use goto
My thoughts as well. The only thing I would be willing to use is the macro definition for __attribute__, but that is trivial. I use C, because I want manual memory handling, if I wouldn't want that I would use another language. And now I don't make copies when I want to have read access to some things, that is simply not at a problem. You simply pass non-owning pointers around.