Many, many programmers come to C (and C++) with a lower-level understanding that actually gets in the way here. They understand that all types "are" just bytes and that all pointers "are" just register-sized integer addresses, because that's how the hardware works and has worked for decades.

It's perfectly reasonable to expect any load through `int*` to just load 4 bytes from memory, done and done. They get surprised that it is far from the whole story, and the result is UB.

Meanwhile, the actual computers we have been using for decades have no problems actually just loading 4 bytes through any arbitrary pointer with zero overhead. But no.

Yes but casting pointers is virtually required in any non-trivial C program, and frankly even a lot of the trivial ones, because there's no other way to do type erasure or generics. Well, there kind of are now, and there's always been macros, but void * has historically been the predominant way this is done at runtime.