Comment by jabiko

Lets be honest. The more likely thing is that either the coworker would use an unchecked exception or that they would change the callsite to:

  try {
    theUpdatedFunction();
  } catch (MyNewCheckedException e) {
    logger.warn("Whoopsie doopsie", e)
    throw new SomeUncheckedException("Something failed, idk", e)
  }

Which really is a zero sum game. The code still breaks the same way, but the checked exception gets eventually wrapped in an unchecked one. We still would have the situation that someone changed the behavior of the function in a way that is incompatible with your usage.

That bug should have been caught by tests, code reviews and good communication.