Throwing an exception isn't saying "I don't feel like dealing with this", but rather, "A problem has occurred". In C++ (ignoring exceptions), you typically (or hopefully!) return an error code and rely on the caller to handle the issue. In Java, with checked exceptions, a catch or declaration that the current method can throw the same exception is needed for compilation.

Now, this doesn't stop empty catch blocks or other horrible coding practices, but professional software engineers should never let that happen in their code (and there are lots of people who do, and they shouldn't be getting paid to write code!)

Checked exceptions wouldn't fix the memory leak issues in C++, I routinely use the shared_ptr template to fix that, but it would be a good step forward.