If you find that exception-free code that is necessarily littered with exit value checks at every call, which discourages refactoring and adds massive noise, then you can call the decisions to eschew exceptions as “sane” and “clean”, but I find the resulting code to be neither. Or practically speaking, exit codes will often not be checked at all, or an error check will be omitted by mistake, thereby interrupting the entire intended error handling chain. Somehow that qualifies as a better outcome or more sane? Perhaps it is for a code base that is not changing (write-once) or is not expected to change (i.e. throwaway code written in “true microservice” style).