[thestoicattack]

Sorry, I see I didn't answer your question. I am not one of those programmers that would deliberately ignore an error code, so I don't know what they're thinking.

My suspicion (and naive hope) is that most people would not ignore that case if they knew it was dangerous. But I would expect them to ignore it if they didn't know it existed. Hence this article, I guess, which serves to remind everyone that it can in fact happen and is quite dangerous (due to a potential later interaction with kill).