I've worked on embedded RTOS projects where we had our own strlcpy implementation - it's fine. Well, I mean, all the str functions suck because C strings, but that's exactly why sticking to a good shared set of idioms and staying organized is so important. And in C, that means manually tagging buffers with their length, no getting around that. Given that, strlcpy is less bug-prone than strncpy, simply due to requiring less lines of code to use correctly per invocation.

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.