Yes, I'm in exactly the same boat. In practice, in the code bases I worked in, the ones with exceptions tended to have the most useful debug information availab

Yes, I'm in exactly the same boat. In practice, in the code bases I worked in, the ones with exceptions tended to have the most useful debug information available in logs. It's absolutely possible to beat exceptions with manual context, but I've only really seen that in areas of code that were actually causing problems (so people actually put in the work to make the logs useful). When a problem appears in production in an area of code that had not been causing problems in QA is when you're typically left with no useful info in logs.