This is something I’ve wondered about for awhile just for curiosity and history’s sake (I’m definitely not subjecting mine to anything extreme enough to matter lol). They started putting optics on there pretty quickly after these guns came out so there were plenty of years and situations for issues to crop up or research to be done by either the military or Colt/private companies. Intuitively the interface between a typical carry handle mounting solution is obviously going to be weaker than a Picatinny rail but I’m curious to what degree it is or if there were any notable problems when it came to hard military use.
I’m sure there will be variation there between different directly mounted optics, mounts for optics, etc but they’re all going to be relying on the carry handle and the one hole with the screw or whatever else that’s put through it. The only somewhat specific thing I’ve heard is the old Starlight scopes having some problems in regards to mounting but that’s of course a rather extreme edge case compared to most optics.