To add to this I had a specific scenario in mind. At @current_job they bolted on a immutable struct library and wrote validations. We are responsible for sending out renewal notices and we get the renewal price from another system. In certain scenarios we were getting back a null price and our validations dutifully caught the null and threw an exception.

Theoretically everything worked. However, the end result is (1) the customer didn't get their renewal notice and (2) we got a validation error instead of (maybe) a NPE somewhere. So what exactly are we accomplishing here is my broader point.