The first is only undefined on 16 bit targets as ubyte is first promoted to int, and int is always at least 16 bits but on typical general purpose machines 32 bits. And in any event modern C compilers will emit a diagnostic when constant shifts are undefined--just not in this case because it's not actually wrong.

The latter problem[1] is applicable to other languages, including Rust, when they permit such type punning. C supports type punning because occasionally it's useful and necessary. The above invokes UB on Rust, too. Type punning has such a horrible code smell that you don't need unsafe{} as a gateway. Maybe for very inexperienced programmers, but they shouldn't be writing C code in situations where type punning suggests itself anymore than they should be writing assembly or unsafe Rust code.

C has many pitfalls, but I don't think I'm being overly pedantic here. There's no question C gives you a significant amount of rope to hang yourself (sometimes affirmatively but usually by turning its head when you steal some), but all languages give you slack to escape the limitations of how they model the environment--the points of contention are how much slack and at what cost. Arguing that requires more precision.

For example, even if we can agree that automatic arithmetic conversions are on balance a bad idea, it's still the fact that there's some benefit to that behavior, such as making your first example well-defined. That's not coincidental.

[1] It's actually only a problem if that routine actually stores the value through a uintptr_t pointer. If it casts the parameter to pointer-to-pointer-to-char before the store it's fine. You can cast a pointer to whatever you want, as many times as you want, and never will the casting, alone, change the semantics of the code. It's only actual load or store expressions that matter, and specifically the immediate pointer type they occur through.

Where you typically find code like this you do the correct thing--the abuse of function parameter types in this particular manner is usually because of const-ness headaches and the lack of function overloading (though now there's _Generic), and in those cases you're already paying attention to type punning pitfalls because you're already at a point where you're trying to skirt around relatively strict, inconvenient typing. If you're not then, again, you're not going to be doing the right thing when writing unsafe Rust code--and there are many more cases where Rust's strict typing is inconvenient, so arguably there's _greater_ risk with a language like Rust when the programmer is lazy or tired and resorts to subverting the type system.

Moreover, this isn't even a pointer aliasing problem. Pointer aliasing problems occur when the _order_ of loads or stores matters, but because of type punning the compiler can neither determine nor assume that access through variables of _different_ type point to the same object and thus it mustn't reorder the sequence. Not only is your example not a case of a single object accessed through multiple types across dependent loads and stores, it's not even a case of accessing through the same type. Unless you use the restrict qualifier, the compiler always assumes that two variables of the same pointer type alias the same object. Whether it's the _wrong_ type is a different, less consequential problem related to the potential for trap representations or alignment violations. But if the hardware doesn't care you'll get expected behavior; it's not the type of pitfall that threatens nasal daemons.