No, by “can be idiomatic”, I meant “is already idiomatic in many codebases”. To name one prominent example among many, LLVM disables exceptions and requires that errors be returned as a value: https://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html#do-not-use-rtti-o....

Disabling exceptions isn’t “fighting against how everyone else writes the language” - it’s pretty common and well-supported.