That's not a practical strategy in a large system. That's why we have exception handling.

When we write generic library code we have no way of knowing how to handle an error in the full system. We want to concentrate some of the error handling while still making localized decisions in various places.

E.g. I want metrics and observability details updated, yet I want locally to retry some behavior. Doing this every time there's an error would force every library and every part that can fail in my code to know how I plan to handle the error.

Isn’t that what I just said? It’s my responsibility as a consumer of the library to decide how to handle it?

Then I must have misunderstood you as speaking from the perspective of the library. Sorry.