Language culture matters. Scala has both `Option` and `null`, but there's a strong culture of "`null` is only for Java interop", so you very rarely see a `null` in the wild from libraries, or wonder whether it'd be valid to pass it in.
I think that the expectation is that idiomatic Scala code will mostly still use `Option`, while `null` will be used for interoperability with Java, JavaScript or Scala libraries that happen to use `null`.
In any case, I am very much looking forward to these additions.
Java added `Optional` and while it makes interacting with newer API's clearer, there is nothing preventing you from passing a null Optional.
I think if you are designing a language from scratch, you should avoid null, but nullable types are a good feature for existing languages.
Having written a fair bit of kotlin, I have found the ergonomics of it's nullable type system to be really nice.