A big study by Microsoft (IIRC) said that ~70% of bugs came from NPEs.
That is interesting. I'm not against compiler enforced null checking, but it's not the killer feature that would convince me to switch to Kotlin from Java.
Your mileage may vary, but for me it's crucial—I can't use a language in production that doesn't have null safety. I want the compiler to force me to consider edge cases, and in many languages the biggest edge case of all is "that value you thought was there isn't actually there".
Quite honestly though, I don’t see null as that big of a deal. I haven’t struggled with it since I began programming 10 years ago.