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Yup. Your IDE will likely highlight it as an issue, but it's totally legal to return a null Optional. There's nothing special about it, it's just a wrapper class.

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Did the project to add value types to Java (I’m sure I heard of it a decade ago) never finish?

Not yet, that's Project Valhalla iirc. It's coming along but hasn't been merged yet. I don't believe it's even a preview feature within the JDK yet.

https://openjdk.org/projects/valhalla

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