ReturnIfAuthenticated returning Null?

[BrekiTomasson]

Don't want to open a bug report about this since it's not technically a bug, rather a weird scenario I've encountered when adding more strict typing to my project.

• Laravel Version: 9.30.1
• PHP Version: 8.1.9
• Database Driver & Version: Not relevant

Description:

Using the RedirectIfAuthenticated file available in the laravel/laravel framework, I decided to add declare(strict_types = 1); to the top of the file and define the return type of handle() by adding : Response|RedirectResponse, the two return values suggested by the PHP DocBlock..

What I'm noticing now, however, is that the logs are sometimes getting:

App\Http\Middleware\RedirectIfAuthenticated::handle(): Return value must be of type Illuminate\Http\Response|Illuminate\Http\RedirectResponse, null returned

I haven't been able to reliably reproduce this, however. The web server logs suggest that this happens when GoogleBot is scraping the site, with the HTTP code 500 being thrown during "POST /livewire/message/toasts HTTP/1.1"

I've looked through the code for the package usernotnull/tall-toasts and can't find any reason why RedirectIfAuthenticated would have any problems with it, however, so I'm not sure if that part of it is significant.

While not technically a bug, it is curious ... So does anybody have any ideas as to why RedirectIfAuthenticated would return null in certain scenarios and why this possible return value is not already covered by the PHP DocBlock?