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Aka as "lots of hacks using non standard C, while forcing the developer to do the work of the compiler".

Yon mean "non idiomatic", right? I don't think he used anything non standard.

The max macro in Section 4 is using two separate GCC extensions: typeof and statements in expressions.

Yes, but sometimes for whatever reason C is all you have. And then tricks like these just might push down the complexity far enough to give you an edge. (Do it wrong and you'll lose a lot of hair.)

In 2014 I fail to see any scenario besides *BSD and GNU/Linux kernels, where C is available and C++ is not.

That's a limit in you, not in the scenarios.

Plenty of environments rule out C++ by policy imposed from above. Not all limitations are technical in nature (or even informed).

And there are plenty of technical ones as well (such as: predictability).

Embedded development...

I always used a mix of C++ or/and pure Assembly.

I doubt that there are many embedded environments where you can't get C++ these days.

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