[margorczynski]

What you said is:

1) Anecdotal

2) Based on faith that someone will not forget to do something instead of a well documented mechanism in the language that could block that from the start

Having nil/null to handle empty references is simply very bad design and there's decades of examples why. The correct way is using a two-value type like Option, Maybe, etc. so that the (possibility) of the value missing is actually encoded in the type system