Sure; in this case, range checking provides an alternative behavior to generating a null reference. But Ruby has other places where it generates null references

Sure; in this case, range checking provides an alternative behavior to generating a null reference. But Ruby has other places where it generates null references more promiscuously than Python. Java does too. If you take every use case that could generate a null reference and instead behave differently in that situation you’ve eliminated null references, and Python has largely done so despite having a None type.