I think he never considered the exceptions to the something to be avoided since he wrote Java most of his professional career - which ended when he decided to quit programming and go sell ornamental flowers in his family business in his hometown.

The middleware we worked had libraries from other companies (e.g. online prepaid transactions were handled by code from a jar/lib from Ericsson). But in the case the platform threw an exception, we could still charge the customer using a slower process (i.e. there's a window of time where the customer could use data/talk in excess until we realize there's no more credit when processing the slower transaction).

For him it was important to write these exceptions well. If something went wrong in production, we couldn't turn off the system, and if we were not charging users when we should to, the company would be losing millions (it was in Brazil, ~200 mi at the time, and the telco had ~60mi users I think, with mother's day and big brother being the craziest days with millions of messages per second.)