But panics in rust are pretty much exceptions though?

The differences are they are actually meant to be used for exceptional situations ("assert violated => there's a bug in this program" or "out of memory, catastrophic runtime situation") and they are not typed (rather, the panic holds a type erased payload).

Other than that, it performs unwinding without UB, and is catchable[0]. I'm not seeing the technical difference?

[0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/panic/fn.catch_unwind.html