My 7 years of C++ and 7 yesterday of C# and 5 years of go agree with you. Many more nil pointer exceptions in the former and almost none in the later in similar size (large) codebases.
Most of my experience is in C#, and NullReferenceException is, by far, the most frequent exception that ever happens. Curious about if your experience with it is different, and if it is, how.