I don't think the exception point is accurate; I think it didn't take off because C didn't make exception recovery idiomatic (signal handlers are not idiomatic)

I don't think the exception point is accurate; I think it didn't take off because C didn't make exception recovery idiomatic (signal handlers are not idiomatic) and C++ followed C's approach, so the major C++ runtime libraries disabled exceptions. Floating point exceptions worked well enough in Delphi. The most common exception in practice is divide by zero and it's usually a programming error.