CHERI is a much more interesting case, because it expands the definition of what a "pointer" is. Most low-level programmers think of pointers as just an address, but CHERI turns it into a sort of tuple of (address, bounds, permissions) -- every pointer is bounds-checked. The CHERI folks did some cleverness to pack that all into 128 bits, and I believe their demo platform uses 128-bit registers.
The article also touches on the UNIX-y assumption that `long` is pointer-sized. This is well known (and well hated) by anyone that has to port software from UNIX to Windows, where `long` and `int` are the same size, and `long long` is pointer-sized. I'm firmly in the camp of using fixed-size integers but the Linux kernel uses `long` all over the place, and unless they plan to do a mass migration to `intptr_t` it's difficult to imagine a solution that would let the same C code support 32-, 64-, and 128-bit platforms.
(comedy option: 32-bit int, 128-bit long, and 64-bit `unsigned middle`)
The article also mentions Rust types as helpful, but Rust has its own problems with big pointers because they inadvisably merged `size_t`, `ptrdiff_t`, and `intptr_t` into the same type. They're working on adding equivalent symbols to the FFI module[0], but untangling `usize` might not be possible at this point.