> But there's a lot of hokey, amateurish stuff in there... with more added all the time. Let's start with the arbitrary "structs are passed by value, classes by reference." And along with that: "Prefer structs over classes."

This is the same way that C# works and C and C++ why is this a surprise?

Neither C++ nor C pass classes by reference by default (what even is a C "class" other than a struct?).