What surprised me was that the GBC didn't abruptly crash. For something as critical as a memory chip going missing I would have expected either an abrupt halt

What surprised me was that the GBC didn't abruptly crash. For something as critical as a memory chip going missing I would have expected either an abrupt halt due to inconsistent circuitry, or a halt on the next read to the ROM's addressable memory. That the CPU instructions would gracefully fall back to interpreting memory as zeros was unexpected to me. Although I don't know much about electronics. Do you think this would work on other consoles, such as the NES? Given how finicky the NES is about the cartridge loading mechanism, I would think that cart removal while a game is running would cause the system to go into that panic mode with the power light flashing.