After having code reviewed a lot of Haskell code and managing library dependencies, his talk makes a TON of sense. Some refactorings of code are basically just

After having code reviewed a lot of Haskell code and managing library dependencies, his talk makes a TON of sense. Some refactorings of code are basically just relaxation of requirements or tightening of return values - and Maybe is littered everywhere / changed everywhere. It just makes the the code hard to read and a lot of busy work - but to no real value. This is the same in Java code. Too many Optional<MyActualClass> / Nullable everywhere. Unit tests littered everywhere to deal with Optionals. But no real functionality change or new information for future maintainers. Just extra cruft. spec seems to be work picked up where Optional / Maybe has left off.