> They just needed some syntactic sugar to help redirect certain developers into less self-destructive ways of procrastinating on proper error handling.

Syntactic sugar it needs is an easy way (like ! prefix) to turn it to a runtime exception.

Procrastinating on exceptions is usually the correct thing to do in your typical business application - crash the current business transaction, log the error, return error response. Not much else to do.

Instead the applications are now littered with layers of try-catch-rethrow (optionally with redundant logging and wrapping into other useless exceptions) which add no benefit.