I have never considered that this is an acceptable solution, which is why in decades of using C, during which I had many times to port programs or even entire real-time operating systems between different ISAs, I have never used those minimum sizes.

Instead of having those minimum sizes, which I consider useless, C should have had since the beginning, besides sizeof, which gives the size ratio between another type and char, another operator or macro to provide the size in bits of any integer type.

With that, it would have been possible to use types like short, int or long in a portable way.

Nowadays, there are _WIDTH, _MAX and _MIN constants for the integer types, but those have been added relatively late to the language, together with the integer types with specified width, for which those constants are superfluous.