I started reading the article agreeing with you. Hearing Linus talk about "taste" made me expect something obscure and esoteric, with a marginal performance benefit, and a subjective/objective debate about whether the value of micro-optimizations at scale throughout the linux kernel adds up to meaningful benefits, and if they are traded-off with less readable code.

Surprisingly, I ended up in a different spot.

I actually think this is a low-level C-version example of the best practice of "use idiomatic language concepts".

When C# first got LINQ, when Java first got Streams, and when both got inline anonymous Lambda functions a lot of old-school developers resisted both.

"The syntax is confusing!". "The behaviour is hidden!". "What's wrong with a good ol'd for/while loop?"

I know because that was my first instinct too.

But I quickly embarced these ideas because they allowed me to write more terse declarative code and spend a larger percentage of my TLOC on business logic. There was a small learning curve to new developers to understand the libraries, but after that everyone was more performant.

I feel the same way about C and pointers and address manipulation magic. No, it has no place in Java or C#. But for C developers, these are their idiomatic principles and concepts. Pretending otherwise, and not leveraging all the capabilities possible with direct pointer and address manipulation is not utilizing the benefits of C to it's full potential.

NOTE: I am not a C developer. This is just how this comes off to me. I'd love to hear from actual C developers if they would say that this is the equivalent of running around with a loaded shotgun and languages like Rust have been designed with solving these things in mind (or something).