I’m probably going to get a lot of hate for this, and I do recognize there have been problems with it all over the place (my code too), but I like null. I don’t like how it fucks everything up. But from a data standpoint, how else are you going to treat uninitialized data, or data with no value? Some people might initialize an empty string, but to me that’s a valid value in some cases. Same for using -1 or zero for numbers. There are cases where those values are valid. It’s like using 1 for true, and zero for false.
Whomever came up with the null coalescing operator (??) and optional chaining (?->) are making strides with handling null more elegantly.
I’m more curious why JavaScript has both null and undefined, and of course NaN. Now THAT is fucked up. Make it make sense.