I think you're misunderstanding the never type. The never type is not a hack at all. It's a very natural part of the type system. Just as you have the unit type (), which is the canonical type with only 1 value, you also have the never type, the canonical type with 0 values.

This is extremely useful in generic code. See my other comment in this thread.

This is an unfortunate wart to appease a desire to those that want to be able to write code like they do in legacy languages

What do you mean with this? I can't really decipher it. What alternative to the never type would you want?