Void pointers have nothing to do with components, they're just a (rather handy) part of C. You can use them to set up a component system in lite-c I guess (as there are no templates in C), but they don't indicate any component based design in the engine at all.

You do have a point about the interaction, that can seem kind of unintiutive, and finding the desired object may even seem like undesired overhead, but I do actually prefer that over having all my objects in a global scope.