obviously that was the point, if you don't even care to write correct code, you can make every piece of code look bad.

Truth is java streams and, even more, reactive java are the only two things that make java bearable, god save who invented them.

If I had to program java with for loops and list.add or null checks everywhere, I would probably kill myself on the spot.

But the amount of programmers taught to program like it's still 1995 it's so damn high

And I am closer to my 50s than my 40s, I can't understand why people fresh from uni say they can't understand something like

  list.stream() 
  .map(this::maybeGetUser)
  .filter(maybeUser -> userIsPresentAndNameStartsWith(maybeUser, prefix))
  .findFirst()
  .orElseThrow(new UserNotFoundException());

with the benefit of being lazy and only inspecting list items up to the first one that matches (and if you don't mutate any data, easily parallelizable)