Nulls are also called the billion-dollar mistake (and that was decades ago; it's much more than that now). Both nulls and exceptions are ways of trying to make the main line of processing clear, while handling other lines in structured ways.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution. In a lot of ways, the best response to "record not found" is that you get the same result as finding one, except with zero answers. That means your main line can process the same way -- unless that doesn't produce the result you need. In which case maybe you an if(null) somewhere, or a special fake record, or an exception.