It's different viewpoints...

In the 2.xx days, the "totally crazy" stuff was what actual C programmers, who only had 3rd-hand knowledge of the spec, knew couldn't be defined. Pretty much all of the available processors used 2's complement, and everyone assumed that signed overflow used 2's complement and certainly produced some value or other. You couldn't be sure what you'd get from an uninitialized variable, but it would produce some value (and would continue to have that value until you wrote to it). On the other hand, people had no idea what the function call ABI was, or how the stack frame would be laid out, so they couldn't guess what would happen with undefined behavior there. It's gone from "it's hard to get it wrong" (you needed to know a lot about your platform to write code that breaks going from -O0 to -O3) to "it's hard to get it right" (you need to know a lot about the C language to avoid writing code that breaks going from -O0 to -O2).