It is weird that microsoft is never mentioned in these articles, despite their monopoly on software in public administration, education and healthcare.
Actually it is block, not function. It makes it very difficult to read the code if you are looking for the scope of the variables, or investigating stack usage.
Previous attempts to doing this have introduced unnecessary ugliness to the language such as the possibility to mix declarations with code. I can only see the language getting worse by introducing new pointless features. Unnecessary bloated C already exists and it is called C++