i strongly urge skepticism when reading articles about the environmental impacts of bitcoin. I am not saying that bitcoin is a sensible use of resources - rather that the claims made about the environmental impacts are often overstated and based on models extrapolated to absurdity. For example, see https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0321-8 where Mora, Camilo et al suggested that “Bitcoin Emissions Alone Could Push Global Warming Above 2°C”. Then read Implausible projections overestimate near-term Bitcoin CO2 emissions by Masanet et al.
Again - the environmental impacts of cloud computing in general and bitcoin in particular are something we should be concerned about. But there are a number of researchers who have made wild claims that should be treated with a critical eye.
This seems wrong to me. Existing paradigms like try catch or returning result codes enable handling these situations gracefully and in an informed manner. Making an inert api as is suggested here means that now you have an api that doesn’t behave as expected but without an explanation why.
“The app was probably only tested against a PC so an exception would be unhandled” means that they did not implement it well against a PC. There are a bunch of possible reasons you’d get an exception while adding a printer on a PC, and I can’t imagine that the correct behavior would be to crash whatever it is you’re doing.