@Alexjgriffith you'll notice my latest game uses tic80 which doesn't have that problem =)
but yeah; to me it feels less that "userspace" is a mess and more "libc is trash" but the end result is roughly the same because everyone uses libc no matter what
my solution so far has been "keep a thinkpad in the house that's two debian versions behind so I can build with a libc that's old enough for everyone" but I'm not saying that's a good solution