[lazaroclapp]

While admittedly not as nice as having it built into the type system from day one, there are a number of tools one can integrate into their build to add various degrees of null safety to Java.

Disclaimer: I am one of the maintainers of one such tool, namely https://github.com/uber/NullAway

It certainly won't help with verbosity (in fact, it does the opposite to at least a small degree :)), but it can dramatically reduce the number of actual NPEs when running your Java code.

Obviously I am not saying this is a reason to not use Kotlin. But, when, e.g. based on the things mentioned elsewhere in this comment section, you are deciding to stick with Java for a particular codebase, it doesn't mean static null checking is not an orthogonal option to consider.