> it is this interpretation that kills off the null-safety debate entirely. Saying you have a variable that cannot be null is not a mentally taxing distinction, especially since everything is labelled thoroughly.

I think you've missed what this is referring to. It isn't about null safety (which is orthogonal) but about having reference/value projections analogous to Integer/int.

What the Valhalla team ended up doing is, instead of having two projections for each type, one with identity and one without, value types never have identity and so Integer and int are synonymous, and the memory layout is determined automatically based on context and optimisation decisions. This is why the semantics of == for the primitive wrappers (like Integer) were changed, as they now don't depend on whether the "reference projection" or the "value projection" is used.

> There is no reason to reduce the optional(!) safety guarantees you can offer with the excuse of "too mentally taxing".

This is not what happened here.