I mean, sure, dead code elimination applies to all optimized code. The important thing to understand is that panicking in Rust does not get magic treatment by the Rust compiler. It’s just a function that is declared in the type system to never return.

The post-panic situation is a problem in Rust. After a panic, you're in a somewhat abnormal state. Rust panics are not supposed to be a catchable exception system. If something other than program termination is in the near future, that's a problem.

That does create a problem for early panics, panicking when panic becomes inevitable but has not happened yet. This deserves more thought.