> there really ought to be a concise way to say "panic and abort the process" when that's appropriate.
There is, it is the Error class and its subclasses, e.g. OutOfMemoryError
There is, it is the Error class and its subclasses, e.g. OutOfMemoryError
To catch and rethrow an exception you still need a try and a block, and you probably add a level of indent.
Compare Rust, where you can generally spell "I'm sufficiently confident that this won't happen that I'm happy to abort if it does" as « .unwrap() ». (That's not a great word for this idea, but it is at least short.)