How can you "let the exception bubble up" when you don't know what "the exception" is nor where it's going to be thrown? The agency you imply here does not exist.
All you can do is what you've described - catch all exceptions at the top level and log them. It's a valid strategy so long as you don't mind your service going down at 3am because someone didn't realize that the call to Foo() on line 5593 could in fact throw exception Bar.
Explicit error handling would make it obvious that Foo() can error, allowing the programmer to do whatever's appropriate, say implement a retry loop. Said programmer would then be sound asleep at 3am instead of playing whack-the-exception.
Nothing in languages that use exceptions prevent you for catching the generic exception type and handling it if you can recover/clean up. As I stated, my own rule of thumb (point (d) above) with respect to handling exceptions is "when I can/need to do something". If I can't do anything, then just bubble it up and log.
Case in point is accessing a remote REST endpoint where I might be throttled or the service might be down. I can do something (retry) so I'll write code that probably looks similar to Go with Err:
var retries = 0;
do {
try {
result = await makeServiceCall();
} catch {
if (retries == 3) throw;
retries++;
await Task.Delay(retries * 1000);
}
} while (retries < 3)
The exception bubbling mechanism just makes it optional so you determine when you want to stop the bubbling.
If you are using Go, you have no idea what the error you're going to receive is, because the code you call could be calling other code that you have no idea about. You might use existing code that gets modified to call into another module and then you're going to get a whole set of errors that you aren't expecting and won't be able to react to.
What this means is that you have NO way to handle errors except to just error out and bubble up. Because all you can do is look at the error, the best you can do is throw your hands up and say "okay just returning this error." How is this any better than an exception?
All you can do is what you've described - catch all exceptions at the top level and log them. It's a valid strategy so long as you don't mind your service going down at 3am because someone didn't realize that the call to Foo() on line 5593 could in fact throw exception Bar.
Explicit error handling would make it obvious that Foo() can error, allowing the programmer to do whatever's appropriate, say implement a retry loop. Said programmer would then be sound asleep at 3am instead of playing whack-the-exception.