The check is not needed for correctness (m_it is value-initialized), but without it GCC 13 generates slower iteration loops: a recursive walk over a parsed document takes 0.5-2.7 % longer (callgrind: +1.9 % instructions on twitter.json, +0.95 % on canada.json). Clang generates identical code either way. See the measurements in #6005. Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me>