"...nowadays, all arguments that say that indexes should be 0-based are actually arguments that offsets are 0-based, indexes are offsets, therefore indexes should be 0-based. That’s a circular argument..."
Yes, that is a circular argument. It's not the one I would use. C made the decision that indexes and pointers are the same thing. It's a logical argument and one that's not circular. If they're separate things, then yes, you end up in a circle.
For languages that are not C-like, you could argue "pick an idiom and stick with it across multiple languages" or "make programming languages easier for humans to understand" Both of those arguments are preferential arguments. Perhaps there could be a study comparing the merits of each, but I haven't seen one yet.
I like chocolate ice cream. I like making pointers and arrays as similar as possible. I like being able to collapse pointer arithmetic down. I like doing huge mallocs and then playing around with large, empty hunks of memory. Some folks don't. I get it. Code should look like the way we think about the problem. That's an ideal state we'll never reach, but it's worthy of continued discussion.