In practice, most real world programs can be written in a way that only uses bounded recursion, so the halting problem doesn't really need to affect real-world

In practice, most real world programs can be written in a way that only uses bounded recursion, so the halting problem doesn't really need to affect real-world programs. Or you can trivially ensure a program halts: add a timeout (and real-world programs like web servers do this all the time). I suppose the analogy for models is that if it can't decide whether output of another model is "safe", then it is not safe, so terminate. In practice, this could possibly be useful in the way a web server that times out after 1 second is still useful when its response times are normally measured in milliseconds. (Assuming of course that safety means anything in the first place)