Same answer to the question in the main-thread: #34271#pullrequestreview-3661806909 and the question from #34271 (review)
If we don’t check whether the optional has value and try to access it and it does not have a value then the program will crash (it is undefined behavior). While this shouldn’t be possible in the current code nothing guarantees that future changes will keep it that way. It is not immediately obvious by reading the surrounding code. So, to be more robust, it is better to have some handling of it.
This is the downside of this change any why I am ~0 about it - it adds visual clutter and unreachable code.