In other languages that use Option types more natively, like Scala, anything that isn't optional is assumed to just not be null: The compiler doesn't guarantee it (it's not as if it can, we are dealing with a JVM here) but it works in practice. I've not seen a NullPointerException in years.

Option has other advantages, like its compositional qualities (thanks to Option being a monad). So imagine the following code

def foo(x:Option[String]) = x.filter(_.length<10).map(_ + "More data")

If the function returns None if it receives either None or a string longer than 10 characters, and if we got Some("short "), foo will return Some("short More data"). The alternatives without an option type, involve at least a couple of branching statements, even if you have a non nullable type, to convert from nullable to not nullable, while Option does it all for us.