All messages in a subscription to an Azure Service Bus topic are sent to the dead letter queue with a FilterException saying
Operator '==' cannot be applied to operands of type 'string' and 'System.DBNull'
The filter is of type SqlFilter and the expression is:
TriggerEvent in ("A01", "A04", "A28", "A47") OR (TriggerEvent = "A31" AND EventReasonCode = "REG_MANUAL")
This has been running for months without any FilterException, and it currently runs fine in a different environment for production.
A collegue found the reason for this error, and since I didn't find anything relevant when googling this error, I'll post this question and the answer to it right away.