The second example is a pretty standard monadic composition pipeline. In languages like Haskell or F# there can be special syntax to make it easier to read (do notation or computation expressions).

However if you’ve never done it will be hard to read. It’s easy to read to someone who has the background, and it is easier to refactor and less error prone because the context of a nullable value (the if statement checks) is factored out from the core logic. So if the core logic needs to be changed it can be done so without touching the if statement checking for None.