My mind wasn't exactly blown; indeed that talk and its arguments give me a sense of deja vu. And then I remembered some of the arguments behind Google's protobu

My mind wasn't exactly blown; indeed that talk and its arguments give me a sense of deja vu. And then I remembered some of the arguments behind Google's protobuf removing required/optional fields in proto3. It's really the same argument. And that argument is a fairly narrow one when it comes to representing business logic data. You still need Maybe/option types when you are dealing with computer science data. If you are implementing your own linked list, you are going to need that Maybe or option type.