> or they would *exist by now.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45120171

Nobody needs to change a language standard for 9 lines of code. When you really want to use a hash map, its likely that you care about performance, so you don't want to use a generic implementation anyway.

> or a at least a community consensus about which one you pick

There is a hash table API in POSIX:

    GNU libc:  https://sourceware.org/glibc/manual/latest/html_node/Hash-Search-Function.html
    Linux hsearch(3): https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/hsearch.3.html
    hsearch(3posix): https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/hcreate.3p.html