A truncation bug is a hell of a lot easier to debug than memory corruption.
I think a lot of the confusion in the C string discourse comes from people thinking they should rely on the NULL termination byte for string length. You really shouldn't, and if you have to do it, you need to be extra careful to check all your assertions that it will be properly terminated. Just carry around the length, and bundle it with the pointer in a struct to pass it around when it makes sense. Not the most ergonomic, but it's C, what can ya do.
Nowadays, things like C++ string_view's and Rust str slices handle this for you automatically, but those came around much later and require more sophistication at compile time.
LOL. It does not force anything - you can mishandle source or destination buffer lengths very easily and compiler won't say anything.
I sometimes wonder what kind of disaster will have to happen to make C programmers agree on a standard buffer (i.e. pointer+size) type with mandatory runtime bounds enforcement ....