The first-parameter convention only works for application errors and errors from libraries that also follow the convention. Everything else, including the JS runtime, throws exceptions whether we like it or not. So either you have to make sure that your code never triggers any of those—which is a pretty tall order—or put try/catches around everything, even if your own code doesn't throw any exceptions. That's more than a bit harder to manage—if you do it correctly, there are so many try-catch blocks that the rest of the code almost gets drowned out by them. In my observation, most people deal with this by sacrificing a certain amount of error safety in order to make the code more tractable.

It seems like the kind of problem that is better dealt with by a compiler.