I concur, that tends to be my modus operandi as well but unless your application is completely monolithic you'll probably have 3rd party init code to deal with at some point. And again it won't help if you need to handle cleanup that's not memory-related.

In the case of an operating system (the subject of TFA) pre-allocating everything is obviously completely impractical and alloca won't help since you can't return the memory outside of the stack frame. I'd wager that there are very few uses of goto in kernel code that could successfully be replaced by alloca (the fact that kernel stacks tend to be very shallow wouldn't help either).