If the change as originally proposed went through, it probably wouldn't affect most uses of bitbanging low level code because they are already using int32/int64 rather than int (which has different size on different platforms). You are correct that it could definitely break some programs though, and so with recent sensibilities veering away from making any non- backwards-compatible changes, an amended proposal would probably just introduce a new "vint" type (maybe removing the old int type at the same time if it is really ambitious)
