Not my experience. I work with a -fno-exceptions codebase. Still quite a lot of std left. (Exceptions come with a surprisingly hefty binary size cost.)
Apparently according to some ACCU and CPPCon talks by Khalil Estel this can be largely mitigated even in embedded lowering the size cost by orders of magnitude.
Yeah. I unfortunately moved to an APU where code size isn't an issue so I never got the chance to see how well that analysis translated to the work I do.
Provocative talk though, it upends one of the pillars of deeply embedded programming, at least from a size perspective.
Not exactly sure what your experience is, but if you work with in an -fno-exceptions codebase then you know that STL containers are not usable in that regime (with the exception of std::tuple it seems, see freestanding comment below). I would argue that the majority of use cases of the STL is for its containers.
So, what exact parts of the STL do you use in your code base? Most be mostly compile time stuff (types, type trait, etc).
I don't think it would be typical to depend on exception handling when dealing with boundary conditions with C++ containers.
I mean .at is great and all, but it's really for the benefit of eliminating undefined behavior and if the program just terminates then you've achieved this. I've seen decoders that just catch the std::out_of_range or even std::exception to handle the remaining bugs in the logic, though.