There is a third option to crashing vs. not crashing: not letting the code compile if there is any chance it might crash. That is what this "buzz about null pointers" is about.
(Checking for NULL in your program won't save you from hardware failure either)
"Rowhammer" over in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15515044 is perhaps the most likely problem of hardware non-correctness to worry about.