Let me be clear cause I think my initial post was harsher sounding than I intended.

I love working in rust. I love Result, and the ? sigil, etc. I love the enums and match, and how non_exhaustive works. I love all that.

I think that means I love rust error handling as well!

I just didn't love `std::error::Error`, it caused some pain. I think they should have just waited to stabilize until it was ready to go in core. If it wasn't there on day 1, rust error handling would have worked great! It's actually a pretty small and inessential part of the rust error handling story. I mean at this point I've hardly used it at all in 8 years using rust almost every day.

And all those churning crates, failure etc., like, that was just some people's opinions about what a fancier error framework might look like. And absolutely you're right we didn't need to get on that treadmill.

I wanted to support the OP's minimalist take though and complement it with my own though -- for a certain type of engineer that I have worked with, "use std::error::Error` looks like a "best practice" and that means that we aren't writing "good" or "idiomatic" rust if we don't use it. I do think it's a completely valid choice to eschew it. But it is somewhat harder to justify if that trait is in core now.