I believe your alternative is exactly equivalent, so the reason they didn't do it that way is just that they preferred their way for whatever reason. Presumably they found it familiar and readable and ...

C typedefs are useful for giving semantically meaningful names to lower-level types; however, C compilers don’t use these names during type checking and perform their type checking only on the ...

Beside the standard basic datatypes, you can also create your own "custom" datatypes, but only based on the existing standard datatypes. The first thing you learn is the typedef command. It is used to ...