That's what I thought at first too. At first glance they look equivalent, telling API users what the expected result of a method call is. In that sense, both are equivalent.

But after experimenting a bit with checked exceptions, I realized how neglected exceptions are in Java. - There's no other way to handle checked exceptions other than try-catch block - They play very badly with API that use functional interfaces. Many APIs don't provide checked throws variant - catch block can't use generic / parameterized type, you need to catch Exception or Throwable then operate on it at runtime

After rolling my own Either<L,R>, it felt like a customizable typesafe macro for exception handling. It addresses all the annoyances I had with checked exception handling, and it plays nicely with exhaustive pattern matching using `sealed`.

Granted, it has the drawback that sometimes I have to explicitly spell out types due to local type inference failing to do so. But so far it has been a pleasant experience of handling error gracefully.