I blame this on how people like to teach C and present C.
It's very important that the second anyone conceives of the idea of learning C that they first off informed that trying things and seeing what happens is a highly unreliable method of learning how C programs behave and that C is not a high level assembly language.
If you teach C in relation to the abstract machine instead of any real world machine you will understandably scare off most people. Which is good, since most people shouldn't be learning or writing C. It's a language which can barely be written correctly even by people with the necessary self discipline to only write code they're 100% certain is well defined.
> It is difficult to determine if I’ve been successful in this endeavor.
Why is your program so full of casts between pointer types that you have difficulty determining if you've avoided strict aliasing?
Yes, if you treat C as a high level assembly language (like the linux kernel likes to do) then it becomes difficult to reason about the behaviour of your programs where 50% of them are in the grey area of uncertainty of whether they're well defined or not.
If you are forced to write C in a non-learning context, don't write any line of code unless you're certain you could tell someone which parts of the standard describe its behaviour.
> Here is why I don’t blame the developers: writing fast, efficient systems code that satisfies the requirements of strict aliasing as defined by C/C++ is surprisingly difficult.
C/C++ isn't a language. So I will stick to C because I don't know nor care about C++.
That being said, it's not hard to write efficient C which satisfies the requirements of strict aliasing except when you're dealing with idiotic APIs like bind or connect. Most code by default, assuming you use appropriate algorithms and data structures, is performant. The only time it becomes difficult with regards to strict aliasing is if you're micro optimizing.
While non-trivial, the case of converting between unsigned long and float shown in the article is entirely possible to do with completely safe C constructs. Likewise serialization/deserialization of binary data never requires coming close to aliasing unless you're dealing with a "native" endian protocol. In the case of general serialisation and deserialisation, compilers will reliably optimise such operations into one or two instructions (depending on whether you're decoding same-endianness or not).