How is it knowing to panic if it isn’t checking? It seems like I am paying the cost of doing the checking either way, at least in terms of performance. So it should give me the ability to handle the error somehow.

As a C# and Typescript developer primarily, this concept of killing the whole program due to a bug anywhere in any part of the code is very foreign to me.

I’d expect that to only happen if you ran out of memory, had a hardware failure, or other such catastrophic error. To me, dividing by zero is a problem, but not worse than pretty much any other type of logical error that doesn’t panic.