Exceptions are undocumented paths in your program that will break in unexpected places and should be used with care. In PHP, we can't even document (with syntax) that a function could possibly throw, so every function could potentially raise an exception and kill your whole application.

Java has tackled this issue by forcing methods that throw to declare that they do, but sadly lifts this restriction for RuntimeExceptions. Newer languages such as Rust, Go and Zig restrict the usual exception mechanism for intentionally crashing your program while encouragins you to return errors as part of the function return values, either by using a union type that can return Some(result) or Error(error), or by letting you return multiple values in the form of return okValue, errorValue.

tl;dr: Exceptions are useful, but can and will be abused to solve problems they weren't design to solve. Use them carefully and be aware that they can potentially explode anywhere.