I find working with nil in Elixir to be quite reasonable. One way in which elixir is different is that you have different operators for when it must be boolean, and nil is not tolerated for those operators (and vs &&). This coupled with the convention of using ? at the end of functions which emit boolean makes things easier.

The one thing I wish is that people stopped writing boolean functions with is_ in front (that is supposed to be only for guards, but not everyone follows that convention).