Hmm? Java gets null dereferences all the time, that's what a NPE is. The VM takes on the extra plumbing to surface a dereference of a null pointer in a recoverable way to code. On Windows this is done using SEH, on Unix it is handling SIGFAULT - but each NPE corresponds to a null pointer dereference that java then tries to clean up.
That the language does not have a way to have compiler enforced "never null" is actually a huge productivity drain, specifically because you have to do your own defensive measures against null or attempt cleanup/recovery when it happens.
Even languages like Swift which use Optional (e.g. a maybe monad) to provide a concept of nilability still internally will hit null pointer dereferences on occasion with faulty bridged code/bindings. However, they treat this as a non-recoverable violation of invariants - a developer shouldn't be trying to recover from incorrect code at runtime.