Comment by marcosdumay

Yes, it's a meaningful distinction. No you are not into "anything happening" in practice.

Your compiler emitting a load operation and it failing isn't "anything". The failure being handled by code that the compiler authors can't predict doesn't make it "anything".

And if you lose optimization opportunities because of this it's because your optimization is broken. By the way, if you lose optimization opportunities because of this, that means both codes are meaningfully different and you knew it all the time.