I'm always fighting to get people to start thinking about areas of responsibility and consistency across codebases, since the natural tendency is to just add whatever functionality you think you need wherever you happen to be working at the time. I mostly work in C# but at least it has nullable annotations these days. I don't think null guards are really that bad though, at least when you have a language that lets you do it smoothly, like Kotlin and Typescript. Like the author said, it mostly gets real bad when you let responsibilities get all muddy.