And that is exactly the wrong approach. You really can’t do anything with the error case at most places. If I write a web server, which parts could knowingly handle a db connection error? Either the db driver internally, or going 10 deep higher and the request handler returning an 500 error.

In go you would just verbosely (and error pronely!!) have to manually bubble it up, while this is automatically happening in Java with an informative stack trace, with no option to forget about it. Java is the one that handles error cases properly (and that’s why you might see exceptions more there — because they weren’t silenced somewhere wrongly!) here.