[Someone]

IMO, Optionals or Either are superior to returning a pair (value, error) because they cannot return both a value and an error, thus removing one possible cause of bugs (likely a fairly small one! As it doesn’t prevent a function from constructing both a result and an error and only returning the error), but I don’t see how optionals force handling errors more than returning a pair (value, error).

Surely, you can just check whether the optional has a value, use it when it is available, and ignore the other case.