The pattern itself as written above is rather useless. What you end up with is a call 3 libraries deep that returns nothing but "EOF", and you have no idea what happened. In practice, you should really wrap every error return in a message and/or with a callstack. If the shortcut method can a) accomplish that, and b) avoid everything being nested, like try/except tends to do, I think I'd be more interested in the concept.
Errors reach end users, and they cannot read stack traces.
Every shortcut makes for bad errors, bad troubleshooting and unhappy users.
Errors document code (you literally write, in English, what you were trying to do but failed, at each level of your program.)
Errors report to the user the clear intent that failed and why.
Errors are a huge differentiator in quality. There is no shortcut to quality.
I suppose that the end goal of the systemd project is an ability to deploy a production Linux system with just systemd and busybox, and run all software from containers.
Not that it's a bad thing to strive for. But it's not going to be Unix as we know it.
Right, that's Plan9.