Agreed, there is no functional base with C# aside from LINQ. So if you want to do functional in C# you would have to chose a library, and that's why I went so far building the rest of the functional infrastructure around it. It'd be insane to use multiple Option implementations. My first attempt at bringing common monad support in C# [1] suffered from the problems you state.
But that still doesn't change the crux of the blog post, it's disingenuous comparing the Option monad to a null coalescing operator.
[Author] I wasn't trying to say that Option monad is better/worse than null conditional. My point was to compare two different approaches to the same problem.
But that still doesn't change the crux of the blog post, it's disingenuous comparing the Option monad to a null coalescing operator.
[1] https://github.com/louthy/csharp-monad