Is the PHP community crazy?

First of all, nicely done with the summary. Very very good.
I got a fair idea what the podcast was about.

Armed with Kotlin and C# experience, I can't believe we are going down the road of making Nullables when null safety is one of the most important features I've come to love.

Null has been called a billion dollar mistake by its creator.

Im shocked I've not seen any proposals for null safe navigation and null coalescing operators.

$foo = NullObject?->method() ?? DefaultResult;

I honestly am beginning to hate the direction theanguage is beginning to take.

I am a glad you liked the summary. It takes much less to transcribe and review and you get a quick summary of what the topics are.

As for nullables, I believe this proposal for a new syntax that is just for when you really want to allow a parameter to be null, not in all cases.

Your proposal for null safe calls makes sense.

I recommend that you go on the PHP internals list and make that proposal yourself writing a RFC here:

wiki.php.net/rfc/howto

You can also apply for an account so you can vote on the proposals you want to approve or not. Better than that is if you participate in the php-internals mailing list. More information can be found here:

php.net/mailing-lists.php