They're not conflating.

mgaunard says:

> The alternative that the parent said was making all of your state be a union > with some kind of error, and making sure all accesses handle the fact the > variable might be in a erroneous state.

This is exactly what `Result` is in Rust. While I haven't used Rust, it seems that panics are generally discouraged and only used as a last resort whereas exceptions are more commonly used in C++ and Java.