It may be surprising to learn that languages without implicitly-nullable types are real, but you should understand that none of these people would be trying to tell you about this if these languages simply exploded any time you used them the wrong way.

There is a difference between a type Pointer where `null` is an instance of that type and a type Box which only has valid (can be dereferenced) values. If the language has e.g. algebraic data types and pattern matching then Option(al)<Box> can be safely matched on and Box can be used in the branch (the pattern match arm) where Some(Box). Meanwhile in a language with Pointer and no flow analysis any dereference of Pointer could lead to some kind of "panic".

Say "unwrap()" all you want but the two approaches are clearly very different.

Yes, Rust options explode if you unwrap a None. But that's explicitly what `unwrap()` does. It a big improvement over any random access potentially implicitly exploding.