Anti patterns are great, they act as escape hatches or pressure release valves. Every piece of mechanical equipment has some analogue for good reason.

Without things like null pointers, goto, globals, unsafe modes in modern safe(r) languages you can get yourself into a corner by over designing everything, often leading to complex unmaintainable code.

With judicious use of these anti-patterns you get mostly good/clean design with one or two well documented exceptions.

You misunderstand the “billion dollar mistake”. The mistake is not the use of nulls per se, the mistake is type-systems which does not make them explicit.