If you do that in C, your program may run “just fine” on the surface forever, yet it can silently corrupt all of its data. Java can catch NPEs and handle them appropriately (e.g. a web server might just answer server error 500, but it will continue to run with well-defined semantics). I don’t think the two is comparable. Even Rust will go off the happy path with a single use of unsafe, and there is no sailing back from there, while a Java program can’t crash in a UB-like way.