I had a bit of a hard time following your argument, but nkurz is right here in the sense that things like overflow and bounds checks are practically the poster

I had a bit of a hard time following your argument, but nkurz is right here in the sense that things like overflow and bounds checks are practically the poster child for things that perform well on wide OoO processors. They are leaves in dependency graph and hence don't add to dependency chains, and on wide designs the ALU op(s) will often execute almost for free. It is in-order designs that take a slightly larger relative penalty since in some sense "all instructions matter" there so bounds checks cost similar to surrounding operations that do real work. You make a lot of valid observation about the cost of actually implementing a modern, deep and wide out of order architecture: it is much harder and uses more silicon that some in-order designs, but once you have it (and largely that's what we have today as general purpose CPUs), the type of branches that are involved in overflow and bounds checks are not costly.