Which wouldn't be that bad, really. I mean, a 64k string is plenty for your everyday string needs. And in cases where you're handling really long strings, you'd probably want a specialized data structure anyway. I mean, it's not like char* is exactly efficient when you need to insert something into the middle of a many-megabyte file.
No, not for my everyday needs.
If you still need NULL-terminated strings, you could have chosen them, and if you knew enough to so choose, hopefully you know enough to treat them like the dangerous tools they are. Meanwhile, the core C functions and API and UNIX could have been built around the much safer strings, which wouldn't have been all that hard to upgrade to 4 bytes (or more) later. Or we could have done a UTF-8-like size encoding, or turn the default strings into linked lists if they got large, etc. It would be OK, because raw expanses of memory would still be available to you, it just wouldn't be the default.
NULL-terminated strings are the wrong default, even though they should be available to those who really need them.
(much to my regret, that is a true story.)