I agree with this. I’m all for writing checks against values which may be optional, but I don’t litter my logic with checks against code that should provide th

I agree with this. I’m all for writing checks against values which may be optional, but I don’t litter my logic with checks against code that should provide the appropriate data. If you’re getting bad data you need to address the issue higher up. Either through fixing your source or if you’re forced into some badly behaving library then you should at most write a wrapper around it and make that as isolated as possible. Then you should start making plans to deprecate that library.