When you add a new warning to a C compiler, you will break build processes all over the planet that have "-Werror" turned on and/or have management that insists on warnings being addressed. Some of those build processes compile decade old, safety critical production code. Code that has a couple hairy, stylistically sucky places in it. Code that sometimes does weird but perfectly valid things because those portions were ported over from assembly back in the 80ies. (And yes, I can guarantee you first hand that the situation I describe here is very real)

C compilers have become critical infrastructure and meddling with their internals and their behavior poses real word risks. Adding a whole new compiler warning must be carefully considered and better have a damn good reason.

"This pattern in the syntax tree strongly indicates that there is something wrong in the code" is a good reason.

"This is not how I usually write code" needlessly forces people to rewrite finicky code that has been working perfectly for decades in safety critical environments, for no reason other than you not liking e.g. the order of operator arguments.

When I learned C as a teenager from k&r I learned that these statements are absolutely equivalent, and I was surprised to see it even mentioned in TFA's README.

> To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions.

To this day, the best result regarding adoption of such tooling places it around 11%.

I wonder how much education we need to keep fighting for adoption.