No, absolutely wrong. The ”right default” is to catch return codes and provide actionable, clear and consistent error messages through an error-exit function.
If I'm writing a bash script I run manually and it's more than a handful of functions I agree. I'm there to babysit it and its probably complicated.
If the bash script is ran on thousands of containers where its not possible to babysit. My number one job is to stop immediately when an error happens and surface that error to any monitoring system.
I agree about that distinction, but still, won’t that error need to be formatted? Is it safe to rely on logging picking up on the error or does the ”simple script” solution imply that there is monitoring for the script exit code?
