I’ve said before and will say again: error handling is most of what’s hard about programming (certainly most of what’s hard about distributed systems).
I keep looking for a programming language that makes error handling a central part of the design (rather than focusing on non-error control flow of various kinds), but honestly I don’t even know what would be better than the current options (Java/Python’s exceptions, or Go’s multiple returns, or Rust’s similar-seeming Result<T, E>). I know Linus likes using goto for errors (though I think it just kind of looks like try/catch in C) but I don’t know of much else.
It would need to be the case that code that doesn’t want to handle errors (like Max’s simple website) doesn’t have any error handling code, but it’s easy to add, and common patterns (e.g. “retry this inner operation N times, maybe with back off and jitter, and then fail this outer operation, either exiting the program or leaving unaffected parts running”) are easy to express