> and I end up having all these typedefs in my projects

I avoid doing this now. It's more trouble than it's worth and it changes your code from a standard dialect of C into a custom one. Plus my eyes are old and they don't enjoy separating short identifiers.

> typedef struct { ... } String

I avoid doing this. Just use `struct string { ... };'. It makes it clear what you're handling. C23 finally gave us "auto", you shouldn't fret over typedefing everything anymore. I also prefer a "strbuf" type with an index and capacity so I can safely read and write to it with a derived "strview" having pointer and length only which references into the buffer.

> returning results

The general method of returning structures larger than two machine words is fairly inefficient. Plus you're cutting yourself off from another C23 gem which was [[nodiscard]]. If you want the 'ok' value checked then you can _really_ specify that. Put everything else behind a pointer passed in an argument. The sum type logic works just as well there.

> I tend to avoid the string.h functions most of the time, only employing the mem family when I want to, well, mess with memory.

So you use strlen() a lot and don't have to deal with multibyte characters anywhere in your code. It's not much of a strategy.

> > typedef struct { ... } String

> I avoid doing this. Just use `struct string { ... };'. It makes it clear what you're handling.

Well then imagine if Gtk made you write `struct GtkLabel`, etc. and you saw hundreds of `struct` on the screen taking up space in heavy UI code. Sometimes abstractions are worthwhile.