> I guess my question is: If you want `auto`, why put it in C instead of using C++ with no other C++ specific feature besides auto?

Because they're orthogonal, and making function bodies less verbose with no loss of expressivity is nice, without needing to significantly alter the language?

Pretty much every C competitor has local type inference, and C actually needs more than most due to the `struct` namespace, typing `struct Foo` everywhere is annoying, and needing to typedef everything to avoid it is ugly.

Also C++ is missing convenient C features, like not needing to cast `void*` pointers, and designated initialisers were only added in C++20.