Are there really people defending string manipulation in C? C is a slight abstraction on top of assembly. Assembly speaks in addresses and bytes. It's always been bad at trying to interpret human text because Assembly's job lies in the digital realm.
I think it's more a case that programming is English skewed and localization concerns are rare for the programmers these day who still need to work in the realm of C (so, mostly for older legacy software or the embedded realm).
It doesn't matter if anyone is defending it - C developers still use C strings and the broken C standard library's string functions (exclusively) rather than using one of the many good string libraries they have available.
The result is that the same mistakes with string handling get repeated again and again, often with catastrophic results.
Developers do a lot of unoptimal things for unoptimal reasons. Ultimately what's "right" or "wrong" is a case by case basis. So I don't see much point in venting against those developers without knowing their circumstance.
I mostly ask who's defending it for holistic purposes. Right or wrong, It would be nice to hear other perspectives on the matter if possible.
I think it's more a case that programming is English skewed and localization concerns are rare for the programmers these day who still need to work in the realm of C (so, mostly for older legacy software or the embedded realm).