> The language actually provides quite a strong safety guarantee for generics, as long as we follow the rules:

    If a program compiles with no unchecked or raw warnings, the synthetic casts inserted by the compiler will never fail.

Huh. That was written in 2020, four years after it was shown how to write a very small program that "compiles with no unchecked or raw warnings", and yet "the synthetic casts inserted by the compiler" will fail at run time [0]:

    class Unsound {
        static class Constrain<A, B extends A> {}

        static class Bind<A> {
            <B extends A>
            A upcast(Constrain<A, B> constrain, B b) {
                return b;
            }
        }

        static <T, U> U coerce(T t) {
            Constrain<U, ? super T> constrain = null;
            Bind<U> bind = new Bind<U>();
            return bind.upcast(constrain, t);
        }

        public static void main(String[] args) {
            String zero = Unsound.<Integer, String>coerce(0);
        }
    }

[0] N. Amin, R. Tate "Java and Scala's type systems are unsound: the existential crisis of null pointers", https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2983990.2984004