The thing about boilerplate is that you were always rewriting it, so avoiding the footguns became habit.

(So ... which takes longer, writing the data structure you want, as we all did then, or searching for the perfect library, as some people do now?)

EDIT: awk(1) had built-in hash tables, and dates from 1977. Note that generic hashing becomes much more useful after D-space gets larger than 16-64k! (14-16 bits of address)

Counterpoint: when you're writing C, you end up only implementing as much complexity as you actually need. I rolled a hash table for a project that only need to contain integer keys and (I think) string values. It didn't need to carry around all the complexity to handle hashing arbitrary structured data for keys, etc. Multi-threading was supported but a simple lock over the whole table was sufficient for correctness and met the required performance.

The whole thing was perhaps 200 lines of straightforward code. If you don't need to carry around support for all the third-prime-numbered-Tuesday-of-the-month scenarios that general purpose libraries have to, you end up with code you can understand fully and don't have to spend time reasoning about complexity that doesn't exist.

I find that stuff enjoyable. I almost never use malloc, I learnt to use calloc so it's my go-to allocator.

Whenever I write an allocation I try to write a free after it, then fill in the code in between.

Use of static analysers and sanitisers helps too.

Like some people enjoy making all their hand tools from scratch in their workshop, there's a craft and discipline to follow and a satisfaction in doing things well, I enjoy the craft of and discipline C for the same reason.