I think you’re arguing against a point that GP didn’t make. Optionality and empty/uninitialized references can both be encoded in a type system, or one, or the other.
I didn’t interpret GP as arguing for or against null or otherwise rehashing what you correctly identify as one of the oldest intractable arguments in programming. The sibling comments not so much.
Yes, my point was not related to null. For all I care you can have `&T` and `Option<&T>` in your language, but allow `&T` to be null. In Rust, that would be `Option<*const T>`. Is that useful? I don't know. But it still separates the two orthogonal concepts. Go conflates them, rolling them into one, permanently removing useful expressivity.