Thanks for the feedback! I agree that I've missed the check for missing author ID in the non-Optional version. I will modify my code snippet to have this check.

Regarding your code snippet - it makes total sense and I would prefer if Optionals always have been used like this. In my article I put emphasys against using only get() and isPresent() from Optionals. Instead of using get() and isPresent() a developer could roll back to not to use Optionals at all, or upgrade to the example that you've provided in your response.