See the immediately preceding sentence.

I'm fine with allocation failures. I don't want stupid unwrap()s, improper slice access, or other stupid and totally preventable behavior.

There are things inside the engineer's control. I want that to not panic.

Your pair of posts is very interesting to me. Can you share with me: What is your programming environment such that you are "fine with allocation failures"? I'm not doubting you, but for me, if I am doing systems programming with C or C++, my program is doomed if a malloc fails! When I saw your post, I immediately thought: Am I doing it wrong? If I get a NULL back from malloc(), I just terminate with an error message.