Monads are only clunky because Python doesn't really support them.

And I agree, I don't think we should change existing exception handling, just allow the programmer to interact with it differently. I'd love to be able to turn exceptions into monads with a little bit of syntax. Under the hood, Python would still do the try/except, but my code would use exceptions as values instead. You'd still be able to use the older try/except explicitly just like you can express a list comprehension as a generator manually, you'd just have the option to do something else if it's cleaner in your project.

That said, exceptions as values isn't a hill I'm willing to die on, but I will push against "throws" being added, and optional chaining is a hill I'm willing to die on.