It’s not explicit error returns any more than C code with all those larger than 0 checks. You will leave it out or get angry at the line noise and will miss(handle) an important error case and will have a bad program and you won’t know about that until it’s too late.

A loud exception is way better.

But thats the programmer’s fault. You shouldn’t use exceptions for flow control.

To an extent, sure, and that can apply arbitrarily to lots of things.

The Python community, by and large, embraces "easier to ask forgiveness than permission" and some features in the standard library use exceptions for their flow control. It's much more likely to run into overuse of exceptions in Python than not.