Absolutely. But doing things in this style protect you from large classes of the especially hard to reproduce bugs. Nothings perfect but it helps a lot!
I'd never heard it articulated before but I personally discovered this style over the years as well.
... and then there's a NullPointerException because you forgot to check something that could indeed fail (i.e.: you have a bug).
In other words: they advise you to not have bugs in that part of the codebase, which was precisely my objection.