Losing the magic

Bear in mind, many of the people using C are not coming from a compsci or software engineering background, but from an embedded systems background. For them, C is like old-school javascript: You write ~10 lines of code to make the monkey dance (except it's, like, an animatronic monkey or some such thing, wired up to an Arduino). There is no operating system and you probably don't have a full libc, or possibly any libc. While I'm sure these are very smart people, it is not necessarily reasonable to expect them to know about the intricacies of compile-time vs. runtime evaluation, because that's simply not relevant to the work they're trying to do. They may never even use sizeof, because malloc is not typical in these environments (everything is statically allocated).