Exceptions not propagating up automatically in Dart - dart

Question

Edit:
This was a false alarm. See my answer post below for details.
Original post:
I've been hitting my head against this for a while now, so I made some test code to confirm the behaviour that I'm seeing.
I have this code, where there's a chain of async methods, and one of them deep down is throwing an error.
Future test() async {
await test2();
}
Future test2() async {
await test3();
}
Future test3() async {
await test4();
}
Future test4() async {
throw "a test failure";
}
Then, elsewhere in an async method, I made this call:
try {
await test();
} catch (e) {
print(e);
}
What I'm seeing is that my catch statement isn't being hit.
Now if I instead add a catch within each test method and rethrow the error, instead now the code flows and my topmost catch statement works:
Future test() async {
try {
await test2();
} catch (e) {
print("test");
throw e;
}
}
Future test2() async {
try {
await test3();
} catch (e) {
print("test2");
throw e;
}
}
Future test3() async {
try {
await test4();
} catch (e) {
print("test3");
throw e;
}
}
Future test4() async {
throw "a test failure";
}
What am I missing? Why doesn't my topmost catch statement catch the error unless I explicitly catch and rethrow the error at each level?
For reference, I'm currently running this version of Dart:
Dart SDK version: 2.12.3 (stable) (Wed Apr 14 11:02:39 2021 +0200) on "macos_x64"

Answer 1

Okay, so in the end, it looks like the catch statement was working. The confusion was around how the debugger in VS Code was reacting to it.
When individual try/catch statements are included the debugger flows through the code and ignores the exception. However, when there's only the try/catch at the topmost level, VS Code halts at the exception.
However, if you tell the debugger to continue, it will then hit bubble up to the outer catch statement.
So in the end it's a false alarm and unintuitive behaviour from my debugger.