Thanks for the examples.
Reading them reassures me that “if is None …” is superior in readability to the subtle “??”, “?.”, etc.
The difference vs e.g. C# is that in the latter, Null reference is so common and ?. is frequently used not to express an intended business logic but to handle an unexpected input. The well known billion dollar mistake. On the other hand, None in Python is often used to mean “default value” and therefore an explicit test against None reveals intention more clearly.