Unless I have no clue whatsoever as to what I am doing.
As in, I just wrote pure C (no Objective- at all) and for some reason changed the extension of the file to .m
Anyway, not using the solution that is there is not the same as the solution not existing, it certainly doesn't qualify as "the rest".
They code mostly in a C like way, and only use Objective-C at the level it is required to call into Apple specific APIs.
When using C++, then their code looks like what I call C+.
The same set of people that are to blame for Objective-C conservative GC never working in practice, when mixing Frameworks compiled with different modes.
I mean, sure, I believe you that you've seen this. But I've looked at quite a number of iOS/macOS projects and this was never a problem. Not even close. If anything, people were extremely hesitant if not actually afraid of using C features outside of the very basic ones like control structures, arithmetic and assignment.
Maybe time to also review the WWDC session and the points made there?
And although there is now partial ARC support for that scenario, partial is the keyword here, as it needs to obey specific access patterns to actually work.