> I am one of the apparently about ten people who thinks that should be the universal default.

There's a handful of us, a handful!

FWIW Rust checks for overflow in debug mode, and while that's elided by default when compiling with optimisations it can be re-enabled with a -Z flag:

    > rustc test.rs
    > ./test
    thread '<main>' panicked at 'arithmetic operation overflowed', test.rs:4
    > rustc -O test.rs
    > ./test
    Overflowed!
    > rustc -O -Z force-overflow-checks=on test.rs
    > ./test
    thread '<main>' panicked at 'arithmetic operation overflowed', test.rs:4

And of course some languages bypass the whole thing by automatically promoting to dynamically sized integrals.