Look, I said it was arguably not RAII, so I can see how one could make the point that it still works if you do it that way. But you saying "I'm just plain wrong

Look, I said it was arguably not RAII, so I can see how one could make the point that it still works if you do it that way. But you saying "I'm just plain wrong" to say that RAII actually means resources must be allocated on initialization... I don't know what to tell you. That's literally what the acronym means. And just because some low-level pointer primitive allows itself to have a null state doesn't mean your Files and DBConnections, etc., should have free reins to do the same.