Admittedly I haven't stepped through all the code, but it's 958 lines and doesn't look horrible. It somewhat resembles the example C programs here:

https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/

In particular there don't seem to be crazy optimizations and non-portable stuff like you see in other production regex implementations and in interpreters. It's pure ANSI C.

The functions are all short -- no 1000 line monsters like I've seen in a lot of old C code lately.

The rsc example code is actually a great example of using pointers in C. People rightly avoid lots of raw pointers for application code, but for this use case, they yield compact and elegant code.