That post says that escape analysis is "heavily dependent on methods pertaining to candidate objects being inlined", implying that the check for whether somethi

That post says that escape analysis is "heavily dependent on methods pertaining to candidate objects being inlined", implying that the check for whether something is returned from a method happens after inlining. The post then complains that the inliner's decision of whether to inline isn't informed by whether doing so would be beneficial for escape analysis. But that shouldn't matter for this particular microbenchmark where, according to the post, the function returning the optional does get inlined.