But that’s precisely NOT the problem that exists in OPs code. It’s a problem Valgrind will detect if and only if the optimizer does something weird to exploit the UB in the code which may or may not happen AND doesn’t even necessarily happen on that line of code which will leave you scratching your head.

UB is weird and valgrind is not a tool for detecting UB. For that you want Miri or UBSAN. Valgrind’s equivalent is ASAN and MSAN which catch UB issues incidentally in some rare cases and not necessarily where the UB actually happened.