Luau typechecking: allow possible nil assignment on dictionaries

Right now luau typechecking doesn’t allow possible nil assignment on dictionaries

local map = {} :: {[Instance]: Instance}
function set(key: Instance, value: Instance?)
	map[key] = value
end

map[key] = valueType 'Instance?' could not be converted into 'Instance'

This behavior is particularly unintuitive because luau actually does support nil assignment as long as it’s explicitly refined to nil. For example, the following code has no warning:

local map = {} :: {[Instance]: Instance}
function set(key: Instance, value: Instance?)
	if value then
		map[key] = value
	else
		map[key] = value
	end
end

So please allow assignment to a map if the value may be either the correct type of nil.

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