The "Galaxy Brain" version of this advice is using plain old designated initialization of 'option bag' data structures. Here's a non-trivial C99 example from the sokol_gfx.h API to create a pipeline-state-object for 3D rendering:

    state.pip = sg_make_pipeline(&(sg_pipeline_desc){
        .layout = {
            .attrs = {
                [ATTR_vs_position].format = SG_VERTEXFORMAT_FLOAT3,
                [ATTR_vs_color0].format   = SG_VERTEXFORMAT_FLOAT4
            }
        },
        .shader = shd,
        .index_type = SG_INDEXTYPE_UINT16,
        .cull_mode = SG_CULLMODE_BACK,
        .depth = {
            .write_enabled = true,
            .compare = SG_COMPAREFUNC_LESS_EQUAL,
        },
        .label = "cube-pipeline"
    });

Chaining might be useful for data processing pipelines, but not for simple data initialization tasks IMHO.