Do NPEs exist in work-a-day code?

I remember working on a codebase where everything had null check pyramids like

  if (foo != null) {
    if (foo.getBar() != null) {
       Bar bar = foo.getBar();
       if (bar.getBaz() != null) {
          for (Quux q : bar.getBaz()) {
             if (q.getFoobar() != null) { ... }
          }
       }
    }

but that was a long time a go in a code base that operated by passing humongous mega-objects with hundreds of fields (running into the limit of how many parameters could be in the constructor was a constant headache), it solved a lot of its problems by printing a stacktrace and shrugging, and objects would be half-constructed and methods would return null in all sorts of scenarios.

In comparison, the entire codebase for marginalia search has about 65 nullchecks in total. A decent chunk of them are in dealing with older APIs that sometimes idiomatically use nulls to communicate things. java.util.Map, BufferedReader and the Servlet api in particular, the rest in dealing with the inherently noisy nature of crawl data. So while there are a few examples where there are nulls in the data, but they are almost always contained to the module that produced them and don't cross interface boundaries. It's very far removed from some pinnacle of code quality, but just gets a few engineering principles right that that other code base didn't.