Yes, and this is the reason why I'm happy with exceptions for short scripts, e.g. Python. It's a different story for larger projects where I make all the primitives by myself. There I start by explicitly aborting on cases that are not handled yet (no exceptions needed to do that), and then I gradually change the structure of the code to handle more and more "exceptional" cases.

I suspect you're the exceptional case though (ha ha) because error codes don't cater to inexperienced developers as well as exceptions do. They are much more liable to cause your application to fail silently unless you explicitly prevent it, as you do. Good tools are all about enabling average or inexperienced developers to not fall into those pitfalls so from that perspective, exceptions are better. Usually those tools aren't very nuanced so they can get in the way of experienced or skilled developers and you end up battling the framework instead of getting productive work done. That sucks, but it's a trade-off most companies (consciously or unconsciously) accept.