Python's exception system isn't bad. It's way ahead of Java's or C++ exceptions. The gyrations people go through in Go or Rust to handle errors are far worse. The exception hierarchy lets you capture an exception further up the tree to subsume all the more detailed exceptions. (Although the new exception hierarchy in 3.x is worse than the old one. In 2.x, "EnvironmentError" was the parent of all exceptions which represented problems outside the program, including the HTTP errors.[1] That seems to have been lost in 3.x).

I think StopIteration is being removed. That was a a bad idea.