[saltedmd5]

Thank you for calling this out. I have to fight this fight way too often.

Optional is really for functional code, not for "eliminating NPEs," because it doesn't do that - in fact it means strictly speaking you have to do additional checking.

The real purpose of optional is for allowing me to do things like `foo.first().orElseGet(other)`. `first` has to return an Optional rather than a null or it will blow up.

If you are doing `Optional.isPresent()` as a straight-up replacement for null checks then you are doing it wrong. If you want to avoid returning nulls and doing null checks, use polymorphic null objects.