I’ve run into the exact same situation and continue to repeatedly. In fact this is a stupidly common pattern in a library in working on at work right now. My s

I’ve run into the exact same situation and continue to repeatedly. In fact this is a stupidly common pattern in a library in working on at work right now. My solutions have involved casts (and comments explaining the assumptions involved) instead of the ‘if’ statement more times than I’d like to have done, but it ends up with the same result with the added (however small) compute with the conditional since it can be safe to assume the value is not undefined. It’s not perfect, but it at least omits unnecessary runtime code.