I don't think C++ is good for comparison here - there's a huge elephant in the room of how much worse the overall experience of using C++ is both in terms of me

I don't think C++ is good for comparison here - there's a huge elephant in the room of how much worse the overall experience of using C++ is both in terms of memory safety and convenience. It's not as common of a problem in C# to just initialize the array to the elements you need. Most arrays in regular code you will see will have their elements initialized or materialized from LINQ anyway. I agree that NRTs are "leaky" (and wish they did it better) but I do not run into the issues you do it seems and they are a massive productivity improvement, their static-analysis-based nature also helps with not dealing with some of the ceremony caused by e.g. Option<T> in Rust. On the snippet above - it will print true only when called inside the constructor, when the field has not been yet assigned to. It will print false otherwise. I do not see this as an issue, although it is indeed subtle.