When Java was first designed it was common practice to use a special value, usually called null to indicate special circumstances like I couldn't find what you were looking for. This practice was adopted by Java.

Since then it has been suggested that this practice should be considered an anti-pattern, especially for objects, because it means that you have to litter your code with null checks to achieve reliability and stability. It is also a pain when you want to put null into a collection for example.

The modern attitude is to use a special object that may or may not hold a value. This way you can safely create one and just not fill it with anything. Here you are seeing Java 8 encouraging this best-practice by providing an Optional object.

An Optional brings stronger typing into operations that may fail, as the other answers have covered, but that is far from the most interesting or valuable thing Optionals bring to the table. Much more useful is the ability to delay or avoid checking for failure, and to easily compose many operations that may fail.

Consider if you had your optional variable from your example code, then you had to perform two additional steps that each might potentially fail. If any step along the way fails, you want to return a default value instead. Using Optionals correctly, you end up with something like this:

return optional.flatMap(x -> x.anotherOptionalStep())
               .flatMap(x -> x.yetAnotherOptionalStep())
               .orElse(defaultValue);

With null I would have had to check three times for null before proceeding, which adds a lot of complexity and maintenance headaches to the code. Optionals have that check built in to the flatMap and orElse functions.

Note I didn't call isPresent once, which you should think of as a code smell when using Optionals. That doesn't necessarily mean you should never use isPresent, just that you should heavily scrutinize any code that does, to see if there is a better way. Otherwise, you're right, you're only getting a marginal type safety benefit over using null.

Also note that I'm not as worried about encapsulating this all into one function, in order to protect other parts of my code from null pointers from intermediate results. If it makes more sense to have my .orElse(defaultValue) in another function for example, I have much fewer qualms about putting it there, and it's much easier to compose the operations between different functions as needed.

If you're using Optional as a "compatibility" layer between an older API that may still return null, it may be helpful to create the (non-empty) Optional at the latest stage that you're sure that you have something. E.g., where you wrote:

Optional<Employee> employeeOptional = Optional.ofNullable(employeeService.getEmployee());
if(employeeOptional.isPresent()){
    Employee employeeOptional= employeeOptional.get();
    System.out.println(employee.getId());
}

I'd opt toward:

Optional.of(employeeService)                 // definitely have the service
        .map(EmployeeService::getEmployee)   // getEmployee() might return null
        .map(Employee::getId)                // get ID from employee if there is one
        .ifPresent(System.out::println);     // and if there is an ID, print it

The point is that you know that there's a non-null employee service, so you can wrap that up in an Optional with Optional.of(). Then, when you call getEmployee() on that, you may or may not get an employee. That employee may (or, possibly, may not) have an ID. Then, if you ended up with an ID, you want to print it.

There's no need to explicitly check for any null, presence, etc., in this code.