The most asinine thing i encountered is that the bracket operator on std::map writes 0 value if the key is not found.

That's a "you're using it wrong" problem. The operator[] is designed to "Returns a reference to the value that is mapped to a key equivalent to key, performing an insertion if such key does not already exist. "

The "0 value" just so happens to be the result you get from a default initializer whose default initialization corresponds to zero-initialization.

If you want to use a std::map to access the element associated with a key, you need to either use at and handle an exception if no such key exists, or use find.