> I am glad that your circumstances are such that you can just stop working on a project when the tooling it uses turns out to be inadequate, wait five years, and then come back when it improves.

Is it that terrible to just handle an error as an error, without having to know exactly what the error was? If you see some of the codebases which rely on the error, they are trying to be too clever and doing things like returning a 400 instead of 500 if that's the specific error message returned. Is that really necessary?

Unless the codebase can take corrective actions (and it could still attempt to do it regardless if that's the case), there's really no point trying to be cute. An error is returned, and that's that.