I think strtol is just a badly designed function. The return value should have been an error code and the actual long should have been "returned" via a pointer. Checking the return value is much easier than checking endptr and errno and remembering to set errno before calling strtol.
The fact that the strtol example in the manual is 50 lines long, of which most is error handling, speaks for itself. https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/strtol.3.html#:~:text=...
That being said, I can't imagine many applications where crashing is a good solution.