I think you are right in the general case. Definitely padding bits are not preserved during copies, but I think that at least in some cases they might be preserved, at least I think that if you memset+memcpy, the memcpy is guaranteed to see the zeros (what if you want to end the lifetime of the object and simply reuse the storage as an array of chars?). But there is divergence between C and C++ and also an area quite in flux (the notion of lifetimes of objects and memory locations gets tweaked every standard in C++, not sure where we are at now).

edit: interestingly, Biriba is yet another game in the canasta family, my theory is that different groups were originally playing these differents variants, but when they gained knowledge of the more popular variant (burraco), they started playing it but kept calling it with the original name. I guess that up until the internet era, these games were mostly passed via oral knowledge in casual groups.

edit2: macchiavelli [1] is another very fun game of the same family, but a lot more puzzle solving oriented.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavelli_(Italian_card_game...