It's only "simpler" if you approach programming from a low-level, non-functional perspective, which seems to be where you come from. The parent is talking about complexity in terms of solution complexity (avoiding undesireable states and writing fail-proof software), not in number of machine-code instructions generated, or not having to learn a new abstraction.

The people interested in functional programming and compile-time guarantees want to work at higher-levels of abstraction, where Exceptions are just hard to typecheck crutches that effectively implement the Option/Either types but outside of control of you compiler (at the call stack level).