Don't ignore endianness. But making little endian the default is the right thing to do, it is so much more ubiquitous in the modern world.

The vast majority of modern network protocols use little endian byte ordering. Most Linux filesystems use little endian for their on-disk binary representations.

There is absolutely no good reason for networking protocols to be defined to use big endian. It's an antiquated arbitrary idea: just do what makes sense.

Use these functions to avoid ifdef noise: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/endian.3.html