If the only trade-off considered is 'writing "gobbledy gunk" to handle exceptions poorly' vs 'not handling them at all' then, of course, checked exceptions will look bad.
If the trade-off is whether the compiler will be able to tell me that I'm not handling an exception, well, I want the compiler to help me out. People writing low-consequence code can sprinkle "throws Exception" everywhere.
Without checked exceptions, it becomes my job to ensure that exceptions are handled, and I am nowhere near as thorough as the compiler.
> what you maybe need is a different design*
Could be. Perhaps exceptions on the whole are not a good error mechanism because of the way programmers think about them.
Picking two HN favorites, Rust has Result<T, E> and Zig has error sets, both of which effectively work a lot like checked exceptions but with better syntax (and without the bad rap). try/catch is clunky by comparison.
