The problem with not checking for null is that it won't fail soon enough. null will get passed along until someone tries to call a method on it, at which point

The problem with not checking for null is that it won't fail soon enough. null will get passed along until someone tries to call a method on it, at which point you'll get a NullPointerException. But at that point you don't know where the null came from. It's better to fail early. Lombok can help with this, with its @NonNull annotation, but that only helps so much.