[Thiez]

One of those cases happens accidentally all the time (in more complex variants than the motivating example you responded to), the other never happens except on purpose. It's like complaining guard rails are pointless because people being launched with catapults might still fly over them and plunge to their deaths.

[consteval]

I've never seen a nullptr somehow sneak into a reference. Never.

What I have seen is automatic variables escaping their scope as a reference, which rust protects against. And is also much more dangerous, because dereferencing a nullptr is defined behavior on most platforms