> The difference is that in C one is supposed to do allocations and deallocations oneself

No, you should only use the heap if necessary.

The bigger issue in C is there is no concept of references, so if you want to modify memory, the only recourse is return-by-value or a pointer. Usually you see the latter, before return value optimization it was considered a waste of cycles to copy structs.

In the embedded world, its often the case you won't see a single malloc/free anywhere. Because sizes of inputs were often fixed and known at compile time for a particular configuration.