Get rid of Optional to reduce memory footprint

[ahamlat]

Following the data shared in this comment #1398 (comment), we need to investigate and get rid of Optionals to reduce memory usage.

[ahamlat]

We need to keep in mind here that we want to get rid of the optional wrapper, but still need the data. Removing the optional overhead will not save more than 4 GiB in this case.