[realcr]

I stumbled upon this article today. My first thought was that this is an interesting question, then I continued reading and thought that the solution ideas are kind of crude. Then I noticed it was written at 2018, so I realized we should give the author a break. Finally I realized that it was me who wrote this, 6 years ago!

So much has changed, but I believe the easy solution already existed back then. As people wrote in the comments here, one can iterate over an Option and then use flatten.

Strange experience indeed.