Complaints range from too slow to hidden control flow to just not liking them.

I absolutely see the benefit in application code, otherwise you're error checking every function call.

On the other hand, I completely understand not using such a mechanism in kernel and driver code.

But Rust has decided against exceptions (which I actually believe were part of the original vision way back when, but please don't quote me), so now there's panics.

Everything is a tradeoff at some level.