This is one of those preferences that will never fail to split the room. I appreciate both routes depending on the domain, but I do have a preference. As a games and UI app developer, I find required-handling-by-default adds too much friction and disrupts my flow. Rust and Zig (through different means) create friction like this in an effort to make low-level code "easier", but only if the code is "correct" according to the language. As a dev that spent a lot of time with Swift, and loving the language's ability to express APIs, I came to appreciate compilers with the quality that "if the code runs, it's probably correct," and yet my preference did not land on Rust or Zig, but with Odin. I sat down with Odin 5 or so years ago and it felt like the friction was exactly where I wanted it to be for the software I write.