Random musing of a old firmware guy. In the past I've had issues with wanting to make sure a function isn't being passed a pointer to an object on the stack. Least in embedded land it's trivial to write a function that can tell you if an address points to something on the stack, heap, or is a global.
It's pretty weird to see it anywhere other than malloc though especially masquerading as a basic type. It's incompatible with other common patterns like returning via (char *) and you can't identify which deallocator you're supposed to give the result to from the type alone.