Nethack dates back to 1987 (as the article says, predating ANSI C) and the same codebase is still in development today. You need to keep that in mind when reading the article. Nowadays, yeah, just using a garbage collected language would solve the vast majority of their problems with negligible effects on performance (it's a roguelike), but it wasn't really an option when the project started, and rewriting it now isn't acceptable either. This article still full of interesting tricks to have up your sleeve (comically unsafe things like the "ring buffer of objects" aside) in case you're in a similar situation as the Nethack devs were in the 80s and 90s, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in a video game/computer program of your choice on limited hardware.

>I'm rather agravated that this post has this level of visibility and the potential damage it can do.

Potential damage, really? The people naive enough to try everything listed in this article probably aren't programming in C to begin with these days. The average Fancy New Web Framework That Will Change Everything Again article hurts way more than this.