The context here is Java's checked exceptions, which have to be handled explicitly at the site where they may occur, leading to control flow that - in my view - isn't substantially different from handling errors with if/else.

Fair enough.

I don't understand the argument that stack unwinding is unpredictable -- the most naive implementation of exceptions would just be multiple-function returns with automatic propagation (effectively the same as automatically putting the try! macro on every call in Rust).

Nothing about try/catch is like a "roaming goto".