[masklinn]

Optionals should be used sparingly in de-novo Swift code, as the corresponding features (Option/Maybe types) are in other languages (Haskell, Elm, OCaml, Rust, …): only make something an Optional if, well, it's actually optional.

Optionals have lots of syntactic sugar because Swift has to deal with reams of native and objective-c code which is ubiquitously nullable, dealing with that without the syntactic sugar would be nothing short of horrendous. This is also an issue with ported/converted API (which is most of them at this point) as the underlying system tends to leverage nullability extensively (it's a very common Obj-C pattern as nil is a message sink), which is usually left shining through by simple conversion rather than wrap every historical API in a converted Swift version.