As Stefan pointed out, I misremembered what clang can do specifically,
and it turns out that the variable-length array at the end of the
structure did not work (a flexible array would have worked here
but not solved the problem):
fs/ext4/mballoc.c:2303:17: error: fields must have a constant size:
'variable length array in structure' extension will never be supported
ext4_grpblk_t counters[blocksize_bits + 2];
This reverts part of my previous patch, using a fixed-size array
again, but keeping the check for the array overflow.