Really?

Unlike C it is trivial to catch a NullPointerException and confine the crash to the unit of work. And unlike C you are not talking about insanely dangerous pointers, you're just talking about an NPE.

I'll admit it's a hassle when something wasn't initialized properly and then you get a null pointer exception at some unrelated code much later. It's not always easy to debug. Catastrophic? No!

There are a lot of third party tools that can check for null safety and a lot of work is being done to make Java's initialization safer but also a little more flexible, there is

https://openjdk.org/jeps/8303099

and there are all sorts of practical answers. Nulls in Java are low on my list of annoyances, way behind front end programmers who pepper my CSS files with "!important" because they don't know about precedence (though maybe they think my .clazz.clazz.clazz selector is brain dead!)