Definitely. For me, the main use case of Optional is to provide a way for programmers to express the semantic fact that "there is no such object" without resort

Definitely. For me, the main use case of Optional is to provide a way for programmers to express the semantic fact that "there is no such object" without resorting to null. Doing this leads to checking if (obj == null) for dealing with the semantic case that the object is not present, but other kinds of failure may cause obj to be null, but should be treated differently (for being a lower-level issue, for example). So, Optional<T> is basically a way to differentiate between different types of nullity.