I agree; while changing it into a compiler error could be considered "breaking" (it no longer compiles), it's not a silent break and forces the developer to fix

I agree; while changing it into a compiler error could be considered "breaking" (it no longer compiles), it's not a silent break and forces the developer to fix the code. (I would only worry about developers doing the "obvious" fix to shut the compiler up without looking at the surrounding code to see if it was masking some other bug.)