And thus it’s surprising to me they haven’t changed their style moving forward when it’s known that this is error prone.

Large stable projects are very much wary of wide-scale changes their codebase. What they have is tested working by decades in production. Especially with C where tooling is brittle.

Let me put this way: If you submit a code prettifying patch to the Linux kernel, it will not be accepted. The risks aren't worth it.

The only real way forward is full migration away from C, for which a better scope is a separate project.