Have you tried something with typeclasses, ADTs, or some form of interfaces? C really doesn't provide any tools to make abstractions and lacks the basics, like namespaces.

My experience with OOP is that it generally drives people to very large codebases that are hard to reason about at scale. Usually it brings in a framework of some sort to manage the complexity of wiring objects together in a manageable way. For example, Java Spring uses annotations to magically wire objects together.