I completely agree that context matters immensely and ultimately it's the caller rather than the callee that should decide whether an exception is fatal.
FWIW though I think that Java the language could adjust to that perspective, if nearly all current exceptions were checked exceptions by default and then callers were expected to wrap as a RuntimeException (perhaps something that was a bit more suggestively named such as FatalException) whatever exceptions they deemed unrecoverable.
Unfortunately there's some implementation-specific problems of going that route (generating exceptions is expensive and you'd probably want a far more fine-grained exception hierarchy rather than lumping whole classes of things under say generic IllegalArgumentExceptions), but they don't seem insurmountable.
More importantly though I agree that I doubt Java the community would ever accept that, at least not for a long long long time.
FWIW though I think that Java the language could adjust to that perspective, if nearly all current exceptions were checked exceptions by default and then callers were expected to wrap as a RuntimeException (perhaps something that was a bit more suggestively named such as FatalException) whatever exceptions they deemed unrecoverable.
Unfortunately there's some implementation-specific problems of going that route (generating exceptions is expensive and you'd probably want a far more fine-grained exception hierarchy rather than lumping whole classes of things under say generic IllegalArgumentExceptions), but they don't seem insurmountable.
More importantly though I agree that I doubt Java the community would ever accept that, at least not for a long long long time.