NullPointerException don't really make sense as checked because almost every method will have some exposure to null values. But the idea is that encapsulating methods can check for those and translate them into other exception types or just let it be handled by a global exception handler.
Java is not the best for error handling by any stretch. But it's easily better than Go.
Nah. If you ever worked in a big enough company you would have:
try & catch Throwable at the main entry.
Go forces to think about every error.
C# doesn't even have checked errors, after using Java for 10 years - checked exceptions are dumb.
Go doesn't have a stack trace in the error and thats dumb.
Unless you just always return it up the chain without thinking about it like the bulk of the code I've encountered. No more thoughtful than "catch and reraise" or "just throw."
And like in Java, an NPE ain't getting caught by the error return of a function in Go either.
With checked exceptions you need to either handle them directly or yes you can wrap them in a RuntimeException and catch it in main.
I've done a decade of old-school JVM development at enterprise companies. Never seen any codebase where no exceptions are locally handed.