I think this is very much a cultural issue rather than a technical one. Just look at array bounds checking: widespread in the mainframe era even in systems lang

I think this is very much a cultural issue rather than a technical one. Just look at array bounds checking: widespread in the mainframe era even in systems languages, relegated to high-level languages for a very long time on the basis of unacceptable perf hit in low-level code, but more recently seeing more acceptance in new systems languages (e.g. Rust). Similarly in this case, it's not like we don't have languages that do checked arithmetic throughout by default. VB.NET, for example, does exactly that. Higher-level languages have other strategies to deal with the problem; e.g. unbounded integer types as in Python, which simply never overflow. And, like you say, this sort of thing is considered unacceptable for low-level code on perf grounds, but, given the history with nulls and OOB checking, I think there is a lesson here.