Talked about this with editors. Here is an expanded suggestion.
First, we modify this bit of the spec:

    // Texture is used with comparison sampling only.
    "depth-comparison"

It's already misleading for saying the textures can only be compare-sampled. I think we can instead do something like:

    // Textures of depth/stencil formats.
    "depth-stencil"

So this binding type would be the only binding you could have for a texture that has a depth/stencil format. The shader compiler would therefore know precisely when it's invalid to get the 2nd, 3rd, etc component from a texture.

For stencil, we could add a separate function like stencilLoad returning u32, that would be called on those depth/stencil textures only.

I believe these measures would fully address the problem @austinEng found.

Originally posted by @kvark in #1198 (comment)