I've worked in both embedded and in the Windows file system stack. What's unsaid in this article is that your ability to break noisily varies a lot based on wh

I've worked in both embedded and in the Windows file system stack. What's unsaid in this article is that your ability to break noisily varies a lot based on what the end user's expectations are and how much of the device you own. If you're building a single-purpose embedded device, sure, you can probably halt and catch fire if its use-case allows doing so safely. This might involve making sure the outside world is safely brought to a halt, but that might be feasible if you're building a device that works on a production line. On the other hand, you almost certainly don't want to bugcheck some random big corporate file server that might be doing goodness knows what else to get a crash dump. At least not without the blessing of the client. Like so many other things in engineering, how to handle errors depends greatly on the use case, the users, and the maintainers (which might or might not overlap with the users). You can't baldly claim that one approach or another is best without understanding those.