It always surprised me that in the path of so many glibc functions are calls to open() items in /etc and then parse their output into some kind of value to use or possibly return.

The initialization of these objects should have been separate and then used as a parameter to the functions that operate on them. Then you could load the /etc/gai.conf configuration, parse it, then pass that to getaddrinfo(). The fact that multiple cancellation points are discreetly buried in the paths of these functions is an element of unfortunate design.