I write exclusively in Scala, but NPEs still exist. The moment you introduce a java library to your code, you become vulnerable to them. And if you have an inexperienced java developer switching over to scala, you'll get nulls in scala code as well.

And in performance critical code you might find them as well. Sometimes dereferencing an option is too costly, so you put up with an anti-pattern in order to get lower latency or higher throughput.