Agreed.

Unfortunately, crashes in iOS are “silent failures,” and are a loss of control.

What this practice does, is give me the option to handle the failure “noisily,” and in a controlled manner; even if just emitting a log entry, before calling a system failure. That can be quite helpful, in threading. Also, it gives me the option to have a valid value applied, if there’s a structural failure.

But the main reason that I do that with @IBOutlets, is that it forces me to acknowledge, throughout the rest of the code, that it’s an optional. I could always treat implicit optionals as if they were explicit, anyway. This just forces me to.

I have a bunch of practices that folks can laugh at, but my stuff works pretty effectively, and I sleep well.