> I'd argue that a large part of why people don't write code using them as error handling more often is because of the syntax

I don't see meaningful difference in the syntax as compared to other languages with a similar feature: https://go.dev/play/p/RrO1OrzIPNe How deep are we really going to split hairs here?

If it were commonly used you could clean it up a little, like how the somewhat recently added iterators feature cleaned up what people were already doing with iteration, but in this case since it is so rarely used in the first place, why bother? "If you build it, they will come" is Hollywood fantasy. Unlike this, the use of iterators was already prevalent before the iterators feature was added.

Let's be honest: If it were useful, people would already put up with the above being slightly less than perfect. People will actually put up with a lot of shit when something is useful at its core! But that they are doing this almost never is quite telling.

> What's strange to me is that the main reason this seems like the best path forward to me is because it doesn't require large fundamental changes to the language

Or maybe no changes at all. Would using the above really be so bad from a syntactical point of view? The much bigger problem, and why pretty much all modern languages have moved to returning errors as the defacto solution, is that it exhibits all the same fundamental problems as errors under Java exception handling. That is something syntax cannot fix.

And, well, for the exceptional (pun intended?) cases where Java-style exception handling really its the best option to suit your circumstances: It's there to use already!