it can be not-so-bad, because it's something like, "oh, i passed in the wrong file" or "oh, that menu item is broken" or something like that. you as a user are entirely in control of the inputs & the state is usually just a file or two, so it's easy to just try again until things work.

but for something running on a server somewhere, many inputs are beyond the user's control & the state is long-lived and fragile (if my HN or FB account gets somehow b0rked, that's a serious problem for me), so it's important to handle all possible error conditions in the best possible way. in my experience this is something exceptions make very hard to do.

(& i would still prefer explicit error handling even for front-end software, but i think the argument for exceptions is at least stronger there.)