Author here. I wish I had made it clearer that the intent of the post was "this is an interesting and surprising thing you can achieve in C" and not "this is a good idea for a real software project" or "this is a reason to use C instead of C++/Rust/Go".

This is in fact a pretty common pattern in production code.

Here's an entire suite of type safe generic data structures in C: https://github.com/attractivechaos/klib