When the first wave of null check operators came out our code bases filled up with ? operators. I luckily had used the operator in swift and rust to somewhat know what it can do and what not. Worse the fact that unlike rust the ? operator only works on null. So people started to use null as an optional value. And I think that is at the core the problem of the feature. C# is not advertising or using this themselves in this way. I think the nullable checks etc are great way to keep NPE under control. But they can promote lazy programming as well. In code reviews more often than not the question comes up, when somebody is using ? either as operator or as nullable type like ‘string?’, are you sure the value should be nullable? And why are you hiding a bug with a conditional access when the value should never be null in the first place.