> when they can just as well leave the choice to somebody else, at exactly zero cost.
This is where the confusion lies. “Zero cost” here means “it’s a few lines of code, a few cpu cycles to handle it. What’s the big deal?”
But I’m not talking about a few lines of code or cpu cycles, I’m talking about developer time. Leaving the decision to someone else may take little no time to you, today, but might incur a steep cost on someone else’s time tomorrow. Even worse is when you, with deep domain knowledge, tempt a far less knowledgeable dev into “handling” an error at a time and in a place that will be difficult or impossible to handle, wasting their time.
