I mean when people say Nulls are bad I don't think they necessarily mean they are categorically bad, only that allowing every single object in a system to have

I mean when people say Nulls are bad I don't think they necessarily mean they are categorically bad, only that allowing every single object in a system to have a null value without any supporting language features requires a lot of discipline. I don't know anyone that's used something like Maybe[String] and felt it was categorically no better than 'null' values, but on some level they are both features that express the same thing. Just one of them is more coherent and targeted. When people say that null was a billion dollar mistake I don't think they were referring to any possible implementation of a value that indicates nonexistence.