I am actually not talking about the lack of fat pointers. That is almost entirely orthogonal to my point. I am talking about the fact that what would be the syntax for passing a array by value was repurposed for automatically decaying into a pointer. This results in a massive and unnecessary syntactic wart.

The fact that the correct type signature, a pointer to fixed-size array, exists and that you can create a struct containing a fixed-size array member and pass that in by value completely invalidates any possible argument for having special semantics for fixed-size array parameters. Automatic decay should have died when it became possible to pass structs by value. Its continued existence continues to result in people writing objectively inferior function signatures (though part of this it the absurdity of C type declarations making the objectively correct type a pain to write or use, another one of the worst actual design mistakes).

Fat pointers or argument-aware non-fixed size array parameters are a separate valuable feature, but it is at least understandable for them to not have been included at the time.