There absolutely are reasonable alternate ways to represent ordered data that don't involve templates. The way that C does it makes sense in most cases, and if you are looking at something that you cannot understand, you are looking at bad code.

> "Declaration follows use" immediately goes out the window when faced with typedeffed types being used as the base type

Typedefs are an abstraction. If you create a typedef, it is usually because you only want to handle the data as a whole, passing it to helper functions that remove the typedef. Also, declaration of use does not break down with typedefs:

    typedef char *(*fn)(int, char *);
    fn my_fn;

    char *s = (*my_fn)(0, ""); // Proper use

Please give me an example of some C code where this is the case.

std::array isn't a thing in C, so you don't.

huh? where is the extra layer?

    std::array<int, 5> array_of_ints = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 };

?

    int c_style_array[5] = {2, 3, 5, 7, 11};