Destructors are hidden control flow, and can be non-obvious for structs from other files. I find they make code significantly harder to follow than in plain C. Defer does not have the problem, as all the logic in your function is explicitly there.
Exactly. Both C++ RAII (constructors/destructors) and C23 defer are awful. They make the behavior implicit; in effect they tie an indefinitely large (and growing) baggage to scope termination without the source code reflecting that baggage.
Cascading gotos (or the arrow pattern) are much better. Cleanup code execution is clearly reflected by location in the source code; the exit path can be easily stepped through in a debugger.