> I do sometimes miss how utterly simple and dumb C is

You can make an argument that the K&R C "is" an utterly simple and dumb language, but if it was it's long gone and it's also irrelevant for modern hardware.

Today because C only has a single kind of reference, the raw pointer, that means if you want references at all (which you do) you need pointers, and to get decent performance from this sort of language you need pointer provenance, and so now all your reference types involve understanding compiler internals minutiae. Bad luck though, those aren't specified in the C language standard, that's a TODO item from the turn of the century. The committee agrees that C pointers do have provenance but declines to explain how that could possibly work.