Every path in a radix trie ends with a leaf or a NULL. By replacing NULL (non-leaf) pointers with NULL leaves, there is a NULL test removed from every iteration of an index-based search loop.
This is one of three major changes first presented in D40979, where cumulatively they improved lookup times by 17% to 23% in testing, and insert/remove times by about 5%. The other changes will follow this one.