Also the reason something can fail for any reason whatsoever is because the linux kernel cannot just decide to shut down your computer if a cosmic ray flips a bit while the cpu is reading from ram.

The reason you can write your small library is because of the work done.

Also the reason for my comment in general was the linux kernel is, in my opinion, the most used library on the planet and was and still is predominantly built on C.

Sometimes pretty APIs are not what you need. You need APIs that have been and will continue to do what needs to be done for decades