Okay. I think the same way and agree with you. I’m just sanity checking myself with other people’s opinions as my instant reaction was to refactor like I always do to eliminate every hard reference possible. But then I realised, in some situations it is probably just fine.
To answer your question, it is a player controller that can never die. It exists as long as the level exists. I suppose there could be a fail state where it fails to spawn, in which case so would the hard referenced actor, since it spawns on Begin Play in the player controller.