> Of course, if you’re the sort of person who deals with errors in rust by just slapping ? on anything that might fail, then you’re more or less just doing exceptions

Well, no, not really. You typically still explicitly enumerate how your code may fail to use that notation (unless it’s a small utility where you just anyhow it), you also have the fallible values clearly denoted as such, and not everything is fallible. And last, but not least, every time I slap a ‘?’ I tend to quickly evaluate what the failure case is, and if it’s something I can’t do anything about at the moment and should just bubble up, or is it something I can actually handle.

So, no, not the same thing as exceptions at all!