Old Unix programs running on modern computers

My experience has been the opposite. The idiomatic patterns is to have errors handled at the callsite, rather than bubble up. In java codebases I've worked on, you tend to have catch-everything parts of the code that are unable to address the specific problem, and mitigate it by restarting work, or just logging largely because they don't know what went wrong. Not that can't address the issue with exceptions more specifically (it happens all the time) but that often it is easier not to, and just to group all exceptions by their class and move on. In go codebases, In production go-codebases I've tended to see if/else logic for every case. This makes the code horrible to read IMHO, to get a general sense of what is happening, but make much more of specific logic explicit and directly handled.