The issue is pretending that C even has strings as a semantic concept. It just doesn't. C has sugar to obtain a contiguous block of memory storing a set number of bytes and to initialize them with values you can understand as the string you want. Then you are passing a memory address around and hoping the magic value byte is where it should be.

C is semantically so poor, I find it hard to understand why people use it for new projects today. C++ is over complicated but at least you can find a good subset of it.