[AssertErNullNPE]

I can't speak to how prevalent it is in the industry, but something my team has started doing in our web services is building with GraalVM and deploying native images. The build time can be super long, but the benefit is incredibly fast start-up time, which really benefits horizontal scaling. We're using Quarkus (https://quarkus.io), which is largely built on Vertx which was mentioned elsewhere, but other frameworks (Micronaut (https://micronaut.io) comes to mind) make it easy and SpringBoot is also working on support. If your doing containers/kubernetes native images feel like the way to go.