Good point, OpenWatcom is obviously miles ahead of Turbo C, but it's also much more complex. I tinkered with it for a while, and ended up using the latter for its simplicity.

DOSBox can be easily installed on any system, you can save the entire C: in a git repo and it'll probably keep working in any number of years from now :)

Meanwhile, OWC doesn't have packages in popular Linux distros, only a custom binary installer, and on MacOS it doesn't even have that.