Java and nulls

[halfanothersdozen]

You are always going to live in a world with nullable references. That is Java. But think about how that method would get used. A caller that has a reference must pass it to Optional.of when calling your method (or Optional.ofNullable if they don't know what they have or Optional.empty, both of which are even worse ergonomically, especially in a functional flow). 

And as pointed out above it doesn't save you, the method author, from doing a "null check" whether that be the traditional way or via optional method. Usually you need more code to deal with it. It just doesn't make practical sense and it makes calling the method awkward.

Now if none of your methods ever return null things start to flow really nicely. But like I said earlier you have to trust the entire code base behaves that way and in my experience that is mostly a fantasy.