How would a bug persist in production if you get a compile time error that prevents you from running the application? You don't seem like you know what you're talking about.
Even if I am charitable with my interpretation, I'm not sure I get your point. If you refuse to handle the case where something is nullable and you convert it to non-null via .unwrap() (Rust perspective, I haven't used Kotlin), then you will get your NullPointerException in that location, so Kotlin is just as powerful as Java in terms of producing NPEs, but here is the thing. The locations where you can get NPEs are limited to the places where you have done .unwrap(), which is much easier to search through, than the entire codebase, which is what you'd have to do in Java, where every single line could produce an NPE. So in reality if you push incomplete code to production, you will have strong markers in the code that indicate that it is unfinished.
Even if I am charitable with my interpretation, I'm not sure I get your point. If you refuse to handle the case where something is nullable and you convert it to non-null via .unwrap() (Rust perspective, I haven't used Kotlin), then you will get your NullPointerException in that location, so Kotlin is just as powerful as Java in terms of producing NPEs, but here is the thing. The locations where you can get NPEs are limited to the places where you have done .unwrap(), which is much easier to search through, than the entire codebase, which is what you'd have to do in Java, where every single line could produce an NPE. So in reality if you push incomplete code to production, you will have strong markers in the code that indicate that it is unfinished.