Arguably yes, but that doesn't stop people using it. Basically Java had nulls from the start. A decade or so later some people who didn't like nulls introduced

Arguably yes, but that doesn't stop people using it. Basically Java had nulls from the start. A decade or so later some people who didn't like nulls introduced their own Optional type, as a third-party library. Enough people liked it that Optional was added to Java's standard library. But as it's just an object, it can be null. Some null avoidance enthusiasts also use third-party @Nullable and @NotNull annotations, which some automated code checking tools will attempt to verify during compile/test.