If you’re branching logic due to the existence or non-existence of a field rather than the value of a field (or treating undefined different from null), I’m going to say you’re the one doing something wrong, not the Java dev.

They’re semantically different for PATCH requests. The first does nothing, the second should unset the name field.

Only if using JSON merge patch, and that’s the only time it’s acceptable. But JSON patch should be preferred over JSON merge patch anyway.

Servers should accept both null and undefined for normal request bodies, and clients should treat both as the same in responses. API designers should not give each bespoke semantics.

Why?

Because Java struggles with basic things?

It’s absurd to send that much data on every patch request, to express no more information, but just to appease the shittiness of Java.

Why are you so ignorant?

Why not explaining instead of looking down on people? Now they know they’re wrong bit don’t know why. Nice.