I originally encountered this with Quarkus and CDI BCE extensions observing Object type, not sure how common it would be otherwise.

The code in AnnotationOverlayImpl#annotation attempts to search for inherited annotations in super classes of given Declaration even if it is already Object type. This can lead to unexpected calls to IndexView#getClassByName() with null as parameter.

The code I am describing is here - https://github.com/smallrye/jandex/blob/main/core/src/main/java/org/jboss/jandex/AnnotationOverlayImpl.java#L135

I'll send a PR momentarily.