In a dynamically typed language, whether you do pattern matching or boolean-blind branching doesn't matter that much. You'll catch any error at runtime anyway.
In the presence of static typing, "emulating" pattern matching defeats the purpose, because the purpose of pattern matching is removing boolean blindness. With the "emulated" code you still get runtime-failing boolean-blind code.
By the way, pattern-matching is indeed very much related to sum types (part of "Algebraic data types"), which C lacks. To have pattern matching in a statically typed language, you would need to have sum types as well.
In the presence of static typing, "emulating" pattern matching defeats the purpose, because the purpose of pattern matching is removing boolean blindness. With the "emulated" code you still get runtime-failing boolean-blind code.
By the way, pattern-matching is indeed very much related to sum types (part of "Algebraic data types"), which C lacks. To have pattern matching in a statically typed language, you would need to have sum types as well.