I used to think this was bad too. But when C was designed an entire single threaded program was considered the unit of encapsulation for functionality. Now it’s mostly libraries.

The former allows you to design a coherent system. a lot of design questions which are annoying (“how do I access config data consistently, etc) become very clear.

It also makes C more productive. If global vars and static locals are unbanned, features like closures become less important.