Ish? It is all too often that, at the point where you would be forced to catch the exception, the best path forward is to signal it to the user and see if they have a plan. Unfortunately, the only mechanisms we allow for that in modern systems is to unwind the entire stack to get to the call that came from a user. And whether done with chained return values, or with exceptions, the code will get to be a mess.

Signals that don't unwind can have their own problems, of course. I don't mean that as a silver bullet. But all too often the exceptions and error conditions that we use to teach these ideas are far more difficult because of our insistence on unwinding the stack. Neither return values nor exceptions change that.