Clearly many people disagree. And given that C now has #embed, I don't even think I'd consider it to be a hack.
> I remain shocked at how controversial this is.
I am a bit shocked that you think the right solution to making data statically available to the rest of your program is somehow outside the scope of the programming language.
The comparison wasn't to #embed[1], but to an 8MB static array. You're winning an argument against a strawman, not me. For the record, I think #embed (given tooling that supports it) would be an excellent choice! That's not a defense of the technique under discussion though.
[1] Which FWIW is much less portable as an issue of practical engineering than assembler or binutils tooling!
> I remain shocked at how controversial this is.
I am a bit shocked that you think the right solution to making data statically available to the rest of your program is somehow outside the scope of the programming language.