> by design the error messages sent to the browser are intentionally gutted

A CORS error is not "an error message sent to the browser", it is an error generated by the browser, because the browser has decided it cannot permit the request. (Though certainly a server can not understand a CORS request as such, and returned a weird response, which would then end up getting translated to a CORS failure.)

I think what the person you're replying to is trying to say is that the web-accessible error message (i.e., the one that JavaScript running in the sending page can read) is intentionally opaque and somewhat misleading, because a more helpful error message would leak information about the response that the sending origin isn't supposed to have. There's typically a more helpful error message in the dev tools (which JavaScript running in a page can't access), but you have to know where to find it.