In general it's hard to distinguish between a good idea executed badly and a bad idea executed badly.

I think Java executed badly here.

There doesn't seem to have been a clear policy in the standard library for what kind of exception should be checked, and there really ought to be a concise way to say "panic and abort the process" when that's appropriate.

Also, when you have checked exceptions (or similar things like error returns which it's compulsory to check), sometimes you need to add variants to library functions for cases which can't fail. For example, you might have a library function which takes a character-encoding parameter and can't fail if that encoding is UTF-8; you might be better off adding foo_utf8(x) which is like foo(x, UTF_8) except for the error specification.