Your statement that logging would contain zero useful information indicates an assumption of incompetence.

No, I’m only saying a useless error code and a useless log are both possible. Either could be useful or they could both be useless because the creator was actively malicious etc. Thus, the possibility of a useless error code doesn’t inherently mean a log would improve things.

Really the only thing we can defiantly say is when both approaches are executed well it’s harder to use log entries in your code. If something returns an error that’s tied to a specific call to a specific bit of code, where a log entry could in theory be from anything etc.