The criticism as I understand it isn't about where the errors are actually handled but the ceremony needed in an errors-as-values model, most obviously in Go where you've got to write a couple of lines of test and early return explicitly for each such possible error, compared to C++ where you write nothing.

Rust's Try operator is the minimal ceremony, a single question mark acknowledges that we might not succeed and if so we return early - but there was still ceremony for each such early return.

I happen to think exceptions are inherently a bad idea, but for a different reason.