It seems like people think dereferencing an unengaged optional results in a crash or exception, but ironically you are actually less likely to get a crash from an optional than you would from dereferencing an invalid pointer. This snippet of code, for example, is not going to cause a crash in most cases, it will simply return a garbage and unpredictable value:

    auto v = std::optional<int>();
    std::cout << *v << std::endl;

While both are undefined behavior, you are actually more likely to get a predictable crash from the below code than the above:

    int* v = nullptr;
    std::cout << *v << std::endl;

I leave it to the reader to reflect on the absurdity of this.