Yes, "foo".equals(bar) is useful in Java if bar can be null, but that's a different thing.

Not really different. In fact is is mentioned on the Wikipedia page.

I never got the Java argument. I would much rather fail early and noisily with an NPE than return false and let my program happily chug along when it wasn't expecting a null. If the value is intended to be nullable, I would use an optional.

Well for 95% of Java's live, there was no such thing as Optional.

So say untrusted user input.. many cases where it could be something or null. Yoda checking it was a nice way to save a null check.

Java8 optional is way slower (write a tree alike struct with optional for left/right/parent) and null checks are one of the free ones. (Hardware optimized)

I think it is better than if(x!=null && x.equals("y")

You have to take bits of concision where you can find them in Java.