> I’ve previously spoken about my loathing of exception handling because it adds a “magic” layer to things which is way too easy to mess up.

I kind of see your point. In this very moment, it doesn't matter whether I agree. What I don't understand, though, is why (typically) people who abhor exceptions are among the fiercest defenders of garbage collection, which does add a “magic” and uncontrollable layer to object destruction.

Personally, having learned to love RAII with C++, I was shocked to discover that other languages discarded it initially and had to add it in later when they realized that their target developers are not as dummy as those choosing Golang.

Different kind of magic. Needing to account for every single line of code being able to throw an exception is very mentally taxing, whereas the existence of a GC removes mental load of needing to account for every single allocation.

How does RAII works in concurrent systems ? It seems to me you need to add compile-time object lifetime evaluation (as in rust) which so far incurs a high toll on language complexity.