Our code is more robust and legible. But we hide NULL under the rug. “Code Smell 149 — Optional Chaining” is published by Maximiliano Contieri in Level Up Coding.

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Avoid Nulls and undefined. If you avoid them you will never need Optionals or Coalescence. Nullish Values, Truthy and Falsy are also code smells. The good: remove all nulls from your code. The bad: use optional chaining. The ugly : not treating nulls at all.

Code Smell 149 — Optional Chaining

This only works if you know the shape of data beforehand. Often you use optional chaining if there is a possibility that something might not be in there. http requests are a prime example.
I think a more elegant way might be this
<a href="https://imhoff.blog/posts/using-results-in-typescript" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://imhoff.blog/posts/using-results-in-typescript</a>

This feels like a massive blanket opinion treated with absolutely zero nuance. The absence of a value is always going to be a case you must handle in code. In JS, the absence of a value is typically denoted with <code>null</code>. Hence you need to handle it. Simple example: you have a web app, and a user is going through onboarding. Unless you collect every possible required piece of data in 1 step, you’re going to have some empty fields while the user completes onboarding. How do you handle those nullable fields? Certainly you can use constructs like Result or Either but since those aren’t native to JS it feels silly to call this a code smell without proposing them as an alternative.
Another huge oversight in this opinion is the nullish coalescing operator. If you have nullable values (see above paragraph for justification), then IMO its perfectly reasonable to use optional chaining as long as you always follow it with a default value via nullish coalescing.
The one conclusion I agree with is that abusing truthy checks in conditionals can be quite hard to debug. However, sometimes it is a perfectly reasonable solution (e.g. query for a row from the DB; if it is present do A , else do B).