[wizofaus]

Code that I've worked with over the last 25 years not using exceptions almost invariably has worse error handling than that without. YMMV.

(As far as regular vs exceptional flow goes, think about what sort of acceptance criteria are written into story requirements. I've never seen the expected behaviour for out of memory or even critical network failures written up as part of a user story. In many cases it's decided for you by the libraries used anyway)