Yeah, I regret writing that translation. The problem with letting the user return nested pointers like char ** is that in good logic they should then also write a corresponding custom freeing function, e.g. void free_words(size_t n, char *words[n]);. But then many users would just leave it blank, because the tests would not check its correctness (it's not impossible to do so, but it is very cumbersome and clunky); so it would make for an awkward kata that asks to write two functions but can only reliably test one of them.

I don't like how this kata enforces a specific memory layout of C strings. If it wasn't so strict I could have just stored them back to back in a single allocation and just used the strtok output. That would have been nice