After reading this kind of code for a week it becomes as easy as anything else. As long as there’s no pyramids of doom (possible with plain if else, promise .then and async/await and this optional and_then) code will be easy to read.
That's true for many things we as humans can become accustomed to. But what exactly is the (hopefully quantifiable) improvement here? Otherwise, it's just a style option of preference.
If you use the optional type, then nothing. It’s just style. If you don’t use it and your compiler can tell you’re dereferencing a possible null value, then again you gain nothing.
