Short answer: No, this guy is all the way up his own rear end.
Longer answer:
Author: “C is not ‘close to hardware’”
Also Author: “Successful one to one struct comparisons may require padding, which isn’t automatically applied!!!”
Like if you have an entire PhD on this stuff and you don’t understand how and why you need to pad, when you need to do it, and how to calculate the proper amount of padding, maybe somebody should’ve stopped you before you showed your whole ass on the Internet like that.
(Padding is applied to align chunks of data more closely to the size of memory writes possible in a given architecture, it is extremely system dependent and you use it in very specific circumstances that you, a beginner, do not need to understand right now other than to say that if the senior says thou shalt not fuck with my struct you better not)