[barrkel]

Sure, and there's also functional composition (functional code has the same problem - what does map(f) return if f throws?).

I think this is covered by the abstraction-breaking nature of failure modes, though. If your BufferedReader exposed the underlying Reader's failure modes, it's not just any BufferedReader any more, it's a BufferedReader<MySpecialReader>, and you don't get runtime polymorphism. You can write more generics to keep the polymorphism in static-land, but then you lose the ability to make choices based on error types.

The incompatibility is between errors and abstraction, not simply a single instance of composition.