I'm sure Bill understands what I'm about to say, but as a person on team "require explicit initializations" I think the mitigations I would be looking at are:

1. Only require that the programmer prove the variable is initialized before it's read. Riffing on Bill's example:

    Object *x; // Fine
    if (is_foo) {
      x = &foo;
    } else {
      x = &bar;
    }
    x->a // Fine, was initialized by the time it was used.

Of course this is still a trade-off, your compiler has to work harder to prove that all paths that flow to each use are definitely-initialized. When you have initialization functions you now need to have type specifiers like 'in', 'out', and 'in/out' so that 'out' can take a pointer to uninitialized data, or something like MaybeUninit. This handles this example from Bill:

    Foo f;
    Bar b;
    grab_data(&f, &b); // Fine if 'grab_data(out Foo *, out Bar *)'.

2. Something like Rust's MaybeUninit to explicitly opt-in to wanting to deal with possibly-uninitialized data. Obviously also a trade-off, especially if you want to force all the maybe uninitialized stuff to be in an 'unsafe' block.