I think the mental model isn't the issue, it's that the C Standard Library is very anemic. When writing a C application either you're using a big library like APR or GLib or you're rolling your own, and since rolling your own is a pretty big, complicated, and fraught proposition it's no surprise bugs creep in. Furthermore you can't really interop with other libraries if they also rolled their own data structures because theirs probably aren't like yours. Consequently libraries tend not to do that at all, setting for things like NULL-terminated lists and special, opaque data structures.

I feel like if someone wants to throw C a life vest, they should start with a meaningful standard library that engineers can build on to provide functionality we pretty much consider standard now (HTTP libraries, JSON libraries, database libraries) with a consistent interface.