It is fair to have a preference for exceptions. It sounds like there may be a misunderstanding on how Option works.

Have you used languages that didn’t have null and had Option instead? If we look at Rust, you can’t forget not to check it: it is impossible to get the Some of an Option without dealing with the None. You can’t forget this. You can mess up in a lot of other ways, but you explicitly have to decide how to handle that potential None case.

If you want it to fail fast and obvious, there are ways to do this. For example you, you can use the unwrap() method to get the contained Some value or panic if it is None, expect() to do the same but with a custom panic message, the ? operator to get the contained Some value or return the function with None, etc. Tangentially, these also work for Result, which can be Ok or Err.

It is pretty common to use these methods in places where you always want to fail somewhere that you don’t expect should have a None or where you don’t want your code to deal with the consequences of something unexpected. You have decided this and live with the consequences, instead of it implicitly happening/you forgetting to deal with it.

For this example, I feel that it is actually fairly ergonomic in languages that have an Option type (like Rust), which can either be Some value or no value (None), and don’t normally have null as a concept. It normalizes explicitly dealing with the None instead of having null or hidden empty strings and such.

Remote Wayland, no, as it isn’t network transparent like X11 is. You can still do remote desktops, though, usually with RDP or VNC. On the popular modern toolkits, this works out about the same, since drawing applications through X11 is not so common anymore.

Personally, the main thing keeping me on Xorg is support for global keybinds. Plasma and GNOME both have support for the XDG portal which mostly addresses this, but apps still needs to adopt it. Plasma also has a workaround for global keybindings, but I don’t use that. Sway doesn’t have any good solutions for this last time I checked.

Overall, I like Wayland more but I need support for global keybindings for at least a couple programs I regularly use.

I personally use Matrix for text and Mumble for voice, but most probably won’t go anywhere. Discord is convenient, and most users won’t care enough about some extra ads to put in the effort to migrate.