This crash gets caught and handled too: the process exits, the kubernetes pod fails, and the deployment recreates it from scratch. Panicking like this is a request for the infrastructure to turn the whole service off and on again, which is sometimes the correct way to deal with transient failures. The problem here is that the infrastructure was restarting the service with the same bad config every time, causing a crashloop. It's a system design bug.

I have never once seen someone try to catch a NoneType error in Python or an abort()/assert() in C, at least outside of things like HTTP handlers that try to catch everything - which you can also do in Rust!