ntoh*/hton* is a bad API
But my point is not to bash C.
My point is that this API quirk fundamentally changes how people think about endianness, making them commit mistakes they wouldn’t make otherwise. Many people think integers have an intrinsic endianness, or prefer textual formats to seemingly avoid dealing with endianness, and I have held all these convictions myself at some point.
It’s not that people are stupid. It’s borderline impossible to make the same mistakes if you treat endianness as a parameter of a serialization format. But C doesn’t want you to think about it this way, and so you never realize you were lied to until you get a reason to think hard about it.