Even in confines of C there are coding conventions with lower bullrun compatibility and there are some projects that use them: putty and s2n use them with C, grpc library uses it with C++. Fat pointers are in talks since 80s and are cheaply implementable, meanwhile Fuchsia, an allegedly new codebase, is written in old good 70s vanilla C as if PDP-7 is still hot.

As for the article, the dream to get all UBs right without a systematic approach is idealism.