Maybe this is from my epoch of education, but with early Java null checking everything was promoted as a good practice. Even today, depending on what your teacher said was correct, your coding experiences (e.g. if you came from C++, if you read 'Effective Java'), you might still null check everything.

Personally, I lean towards the "use nulls sparingly and be very explicit where null values are possible", use immutable objects etc. This reduces the unnecessary null-check noise and makes things more robust. In java, I even prefer to add @Nullable to fields to try to switch the default mindset to "assume non-null unless @Nullable annotation exists" - though another developer made a note on a code review that "that is not how Java is designed and @Nullable is just noise".

Having nullability as part of the type makes everything more explicit, so I'm a huge fan. Beyond just the perf and safety benefits, it's a win for domain modeling.