C in C++ is a pretty terrible experience. The differences your asterisk alludes to are actually quite significant in practice:

C++ doesn't let you implicitly cast from void* to other pointer types. This breaks the way you typically heap-allocate variables in C: instead of 'mytype *foo = malloc(sizeof(*foo))', you have to write 'mytype *foo = (mytype *)malloc(sizeof(*foo))'. This adds a non-trivial amount of friction to something you do every handful of lines.

String literals in C++ are 'const char *' instead of 'char *'. While this is more technically correct, it means you have to add casts to 'char *' all over the place. Plenty of C APIs are really not very ergonomic when string literals aren't 'char *'.

And the big one: C++ doesn't have C's struct literals. Lots of C APIs are super ergonomic if you call them like this:

    some_function(&(struct params) {
        .some_param = 10,
        .other_param = 20,
    });

You can't do that in C++. C++ has other features (such as its own, different kind of aggregate initialization with designated initializers, and the ability for temporaries to be treated as const references) which make C++ APIs nice to work with from C++, but C APIs based around the assumption that you'll be using struct literals aren't nice to use from C++.

If you wanna use C, use C. C is a much better C than C++ is.