Yeah. References feel like they were originally made to be safer but any safety the could have provided got sacrificed to the compiler for a little more speed, leaving them more dangerous than pointers with the illusion of safety.

That said, compilers are starting to get support for more hardening options now that c/c++ has to care about memory safety, I imagine this might be partially covered by that eventually (eg crash when assigning null to a reference, there's realistically no saving dangling references though)