Which goes to the GP's point, which is that security and robustness are not on the radar.

And my point in providing a concrete example, where a decision was made to prioritize unsafe behavior in a known problematic area, when they could just as well have made a half dozen other decisions which would have solved a long standing problem rather than just perpetuating it with some new syntactic sugar.

I didn't dispute that, I was simply addressing the point about std::array. The class is not meant to be "arrays, but as good as they could possibly be". It's "arrays, but as first-class objects instead of weird language constructs".

That said, making std::array::operator[]() range-checking would have been worse, because it would have been the only overload that did that. Could they have, in the same version, made all the overloads range-checking? Maybe, I don't know.