@lobotomist thanks for sharing your thoughts here.
I tend to agree, it probably wasn't the best decision to suppress panics in the handlers by default. There is an issue about this already: https://github.com/elastic/apm-agent-go/issues/540. I think we can consider changing the behaviour in the next major version of the agent.
In the mean time, I would be happy to review a PR to add an option to resume panicking at the end of the defer, like you illustrate here.