I dont think there is any advantage when the language lacks syntax level support for Monads. E.g. in Haskell (which does) it would look roughly like:

  getUser :: Maybe User
  getUser = ...

  getFriends :: Maybe [User]
  getFriends = do
    user <- getUser
    let friends = getFriendsForUser user
    return friends

  bestFriends :: Maybe [User]
  bestFriends = do
    friends <- getFriends
    let besties = filter isBestFriend friends
    return besties

  render :: IO ()
  render = do
    let bffs = getBestFriends
    case bffs of
      Just besties -> renderBestFriends besties
      Nothing -> renderNoFriends

The Maybe monad itself contains the equivalent of runSafely from the article, and the syntax propagates the failure case transparently from getUser down to the choice of render function used. All without either the hassle of handling null cases, or the danger that you might forget to handle them and the code crash. Without syntax level support, its not obviously an improvement to me