IMO if you find yourself returning a multi-valued result, to indicate errors or other exceptional conditions, and returning that value up the stack so that higher level functions can handle the exceptional conditions, then using try/catch may be a better solution. Exceptions are useful and can result in cleaner code, in spite of sometimes being misused.

Emphasis here on exceptional conditions. Please don’t use exceptions for things that you expect to happen in your application. At least that’s my opinion