I don’t think it’s an issue of whether it was rejected on principle, or because of its origin, I think that there just wasn’t enough interest in it. My feeling is that Annex K is not as useful without the right set of code review practices and static analysis tools. Many of the secure variants just take an extra size parameter—you would need some kind of assurance that the extra size parameter is somehow correct; without this assurance, the Annex K functions aren’t very useful. There’s not a great way to get that assurance without static analysis tools, as far as I know, because there are tons of unsafe ways to use the Annex K functions, like this:

    // Don’t do this.
    err = memcpy_s(dest, n, src, n);