You missed the point: the pointer existing as a value of that type at all is UB, even if you never try to access anything through it and no corresponding machine code is ever emitted.

Yes? I agree with that. I don't really see the issue there. The computer will allocate data in aligned addresses, so you would have to be doing something weird to begin with to access unaligned pointers. And aligned access is always better anyway. I guess packed structs are a thing if you're really byte golfing. Maybe compressed network data would also make sense.

But then I would assume you are aware of unaligned pointers, and have a sane way to parse that data, rather than read individual parts of it from a raw pointer.

I am curious, what would be a legitimate reason for an unaligned pointer to int?