A nil-dereference is very easy to spot in production: you have a panic and a stack trace in your logs.
Which means you can check after a few years how many nil-pointer exceptions you got in your actual system. In my experience that numbers is really low.
> very easy to spot in production: you have a panic and a stack trace in your logs.
Not a great experience for your users though. And definitely not great for developers who get paged to handle these production incidents that could have been caught at compile time.
The reality is that you don't know where your nil-dereference bugs exist because your language doesn't detect and force you to eliminate them.