> C array types are weird because C doesn't really need arrays. It's not what C was about.

I would phrase that differently: "The main feature of arrays (performing the `base + index * size` address computation) is already provided by the C pointer type via the `ptr[N]` syntax sugar, so having a separate array type might have felt redundant at the time".

I think having "proper" array types in a language (where the type carries both the array item type and the comptime length) only really makes sense when there's also a slice type (e.g. a runtime ptr/length pair). And I guess at any point during C's development this was a too big language change for the committee to swallow.