[BoorishBears]

Ergonomics sucked and a lot of people didn't use them (or even know they existed!) because ergonomics sucked

[int_19h]

From my work experience at the time, it was used pretty heavily in new codebases.

[BoorishBears]

I mean the fact that they've been around since 2.0 but you saw it used heavily in new codebases says a lot doesn't it?

[int_19h]

You misunderstood - I saw them in codebases that were new back when .NET 2.0 was new.

To be more precise, it was when .NET 3.5 was new (2008). That brought a lot of visibility to Nullable<T> because it was featured prominently in LINQ. But ?. didn't come until C# 6 (2014). I was wrong about ??, though - that one was added along with Nullable itself.