Sadly I have lots of code that exclusively uses the dereference operator because there are older versions of macOS that shipped without support for .value(); the dereference operator was the only way to do it! To this day, if you target macOS 10.13, clang will error on use of .value(). Lots of this code is still out there because they either continue to support older macOS, or because the code hasn't been touched since.

Just a cursory search on Github should put this idea to rest. You can do a code search for std::optional and .value() and see that only about 20% of uses of std::optional make use of .value(). The overwhelming majority of uses off std::optional use * to access the value.

Not only is this a silly No True Scotsman argument, but it's also absolute nonsense. It's perfectly idiomatic to use `*some_optional`.

It is with a prior .has_value call. It's not correct without. It's simple, and covered by static analysis. This is not an issue in real code, it's a pathologic error that doesn't actually happen. Like most anti c++ examples.