IIRC the reason not to detect overflow by default in release builds isn't any variant of "You Just Don't Get It", it's rather "yes we'd like to do that but unfortunately there is a trade-off with a significant runtime performance hit, so we don't, for now".

You misunderstand me, I think it's folly to have different behaviors based upon debug and release builds.

And they'll argue until they're blue in the face why it's a good "compromise", but it would have been better to do one or the other, not both.

Last I checked, wrapping arithmetic and checked arithmetic are both supported. What is your complaint?