We may need a follow-up item to track turning this into a proper Result instead of silently converting to NULL on failure? That would require VariantArray::value to return a Result<Variant>, which is a biggish change but honestly seems appropriate given that we can't guarantee the input shredding is even physically valid, let alone logically valid? It seems too sharp an edge to just panic.

@alamb -- thoughts?

Originally posted by @scovich in #8638 (comment)