Interesting problem

The non-existent uptake of the Naval Research Lab's library for dealing with struct sockaddr (IIRC, it provided a portable replacement structure and hid all the fine details) suggests that, at least in the mid 90s, there wasn't much interest in reliable memory handling.

It would have required a fair bit of work for legacy code, yes, but you might have expected new code to use it as IPv6 was quite difficult to handle.

This suggests that there's a degree of conservatism in programming, a preference for The Old Ways. This is going to complicate efforts to do anything new that is visible.