How to sort a Laravel collection with sortBy(), ascending, and have NULL values placed last instead of first

Laravel's Collection class (v5.5) has a sortBy() method that sorts everything similar to if you had used a SQL ORDER BY statement, except there is one striking difference: a relational database will put NULL values at the end when sorting ascending (or at least PostgreSQL does), but Laravel's sortBy() method puts NULL values first.

So how do I get those NULL values to be sorted last instead of first when using the Collection::sortBy() method? PLEASE NOTE: I cannot change the database query itself! MY ONLY OPTION is to sort the Collection itself within PHP. I absolutely cannot do this at the database level in my situation.

There is a similar question on Stack Overflow here but the solution OP found was kind of a hack and does not work in my situation, because I need it to work for varchars.

NOTE: I realize sortBy() accepts a Closure for the first argument but there is zero explanation in the documentation about the arguments this closure receives (which "key" is $key?), nor does it explicitly say what the closure is supposed to return in order to determine the sort order. (I'm assuming it should return an integer representing the order, but I do not know how to make that work for me with multiple NULL values.)

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