Have you actually worked in a language with good, first-class null handling? I'm not surprised that something tacked onto java very recently is awkward to use but in Swift or Typescript it's much easier than wrapping if foo.nil? calls everywhere and much more effective.

What? The use case for an optional type has been been documented for decades and iirc is sourced from type theory. See it’s usage in Haskell (Maybe type) as one aged example. Also, that stack over flow is pretty well clear on what it should be used for imo.