I also find this **extremely** frustrating and a prime example of when an opinionated framework takes things too far. **NULL IS A VALID OPTION** and an option with that **exact** value should absolutely appear rendered in the control and not just silently discarded. For that matter any exact equality should work, why impose this falsey / discard approach? It's absurd. I've lost half a day trying to get this working and my solution has been hacky at best, since **EVEN IF** you use a `<mat-label>`, the control will take that over as well. This is seriously maddening and surprising at the same time, my experiences otherwise have not been like this. I hope this issue gets addressed because this most certainly is a concern.