The codebase currently uses the following idiom

Object foo;
if (Objects.isNull(foo)) {
    // ...
}

While this works, it is a misuse of these two methods, which are documented as:

API Note:
This method exists to be used as a Predicate, filter(Objects::isNull)

It also has two down sides:

• it hides the null check from static analysis tools like SpotBugs
• it generates more bytecode, as instead of a bytecode instruction (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-6.html#jvms-6.5.ifnull ) to represent the if branch we end up with an invocation and a subsequent check