> disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now

Assuming that my interpretation is correct, then I assume that you are a low level systems programmer -- C, C++, Rust, etc? Maybe even Golang? If you are doing bog standard enterprise programming with Python, Java or C#, exceptions are everywhere and unavoidable. I am confused. If anything, the last 20 years have cemented the fact that people should be able to choose a first class citizen (language) that either has exceptions or not. The seven languages that I mentioned are all major and have billions of lines of legacy code in companies and open source projects. They aren't going anywhere soon. C++ is a bit special because you can use a compiler flag to disable exceptions... so C++ can be both. (Are there other languages like that? I don't know any. Although, I think that Microsoft has a C language extension that allows throw/catch!)