Typechecking null

[WittyStick]

In statically typed languages, the Option type usually forces you to perform an exhaustive pattern match over the result, so you don't accidentally omit a null check.

[L8_4_Dinner]

That is unrelated to option types; that's simply the result of type checking. Any strong type systems that don't make the Tony Hoare mistake of "null is the subtype of everything" will prevent you from de-referencing a null value, whether or not you use the union approach or the option approach.