These languages make it easier to have more special cases. There's a difference.

> That's a pretty controversial viewpoint, since it makes composition impossible (indeed taken to its logical extreme this would mean never writing a library, whereas the grandparent was convinced that more use of libraries was the way to write good code).

I don't see why that should be the case. Aside from the fact that composition/"reuse" is way overrated, libraries can always opt for process- or thread-wide global state. Another possibility would be to have global state per use (store pointer handles), and passing a pointer only to library API calls. The latter is also the most realistic case since most libraries take pointer handles. I absolutely have these handles stored in process global data. For example, Freetype handle, windowing handle, sound card handle, network socket handle, etc.

Also called "singleton" in OOP circles. Singletons are nothing but global data with nondeterminstic initialization order and superfluous syntax crap on top. Other than that, they are indeed good choices (as is global data) since lifetime management and data plumbing is a no-brainer.

> I find modern language features mostly guide us down the path that most of us already agreed was good programming style

But just the paragraph before you said you didn't agree with mine? In my opinion, OOP, or more specifically, lots of isolated allocations connected by pointers/references, make for hard to follow code since there is so much hiding and indirection even within the same project/maintenance boundaries without benefit. In any case I absolutely agree that this style is not doable in C. You need automated, static or dynamic (runtime) ownership tracking.