You could just as well say that ifs and for loops are just sugar for gotos and all programming is just gotos.

The reason ifs and for loops are used instead of gotos is that they are very useful abstractions that are easy to reason about and save the programmer lots of mental effort. But they are not the only such abstractions.

To the extent that other abstractions can create problems, it's not because they're really just sugar for ifs and for loops, it's because they are not well crafted abstractions so they are not easy to reason about and don't really save the programmer any mental effort. But there are plenty of abstractions other than ifs and for loops that are well crafted and do save the programmer mental effort, in many cases lots of it.