No, but the follow up article is called Stop Memcpying Structures. And the follow up to that Stop Memcmping Structures. :)
C is not a very high-level language. Apart from where undefined behavior is called out, you can and should assume how data is represented on a low level. It was made for writing operating systems and their kernels after all, where interfacing in a bit-accurate way is common.
There are platforms on which NULL, integer 0 and floating point 0 is not the same. Hence memsetting won't do the right thing. On modern platforms they are, but still, you don't want to get the Standard C Weenies on your back - they're even more annoying than the Rust Evangelism Strike Force. You don't want demons coming out of your nose, do you? :)
They do have a point, though. Suppose you are handling a struct you thought were memsetted but was not (your stupid team mate used those damn initializers!), then when serializing it you will get undefined bytes in the stream, possibly triggering hash values to mismatch causing mysterious rebuilds and other stuff.
Wrt to field accesses, yes those can overwrite padding bytes. Suppose a is an 8 bit char field, but padded to 4 bytes. Then "foo->a = 22" could be translated to "MOV [RSP+16], EAX" which overwrites the 3 padding bytes with undefined values. The solution, as you mention, is to use packed structs but in those field accesses are much less efficient.
Bottom line: code whichever way you want. :) Me, I like to live in the fast lane from time to time and those memset/cpy/cmp functions are sooo handy. :)
If you said memset(&p, 0, sizeof(p)) then that's not guaranteed to work on all implementations.
> [...] The technicality of the memset example is that it does not set the bits of the pointer by referring to it as a pointer, so the requirement that 0 behave as if it was a null pointer does not apply.
In short, there may exist counter-intuitive but nonetheless standards-compliant platforms where tests such as "assert((uintptr_t)(void * )0 == 0);" or "int x = 0; assert((void * )x == (void * )0);" would fail.