That part really resonated with me as well. Well the whole article did... it really matches my professional experience with Clojure (except I've never looked at transducers.)

I still don't feel great about error handling in Clojure in general. I can't find something that feels both practical and idiomatic. I want to use monads but it always feels like huge impedance mismatch with the rest of the language (most of the time due to nil being semantically overloaded.)