Error handling in Rust works this way, and Rust doesn’t have exceptions. (It has panicking, but that’s expressly designed not to be caught except at the thread boundary.) For Rust, the pattern works really well. Since Rust 1.0, there have been additions to the language to improve ergonomics, like the ? postfix operator, which will return an error, or unwrap a successful value.

Fortunately, Rust didn’t go with Haskell’s foolish Either, Left and Right naming for its error handling type, but gave the enum and its variants meaningful names, obvious semantics and good methods to go with that, so that the Result type has two variants, Ok and Err.

I write plenty of Rust and plenty of JavaScript. I find that various patterns that work very well in Rust don’t work so well in JavaScript; sometimes because I care about performance (runtime and memory) and porting the pattern harms that; and sometimes because of how you can’t conveniently add arbitrary methods to a type like you can in Rust due to its trait system, and so you’d have to give up method call syntax in favour of a hodge-podge of function and method calls. (This becomes a problem with all dynamic languages I know of; this is perhaps most clearly seen in Python where functional programming constructs are second-class citizens, in part because the likes of map are a function rather than a method—well, and because of its lambda syntax.) Also because you’re often working on existing projects that use the normal JS way of doing things, rather than getting to build from scratch, which would more readily allow you extravagances like trying out error handling models unusual for the language.