> I'm not sure what this is referring to. The try macro and ? operator are solely for propagation, it doesn't make sense to speak of someone restructuring their code "just to get access" to them. Either you were propagating an error before, or you weren't. And if you weren't propagating it that means that you were handling it, which, if you're capable of doing so, is certainly better than propagating.
It's about ergonomics. The concern is what happens when a junior dev hits some Result<> they don't really know how to deal with. Something like this:
io::stdout().flush().unwrap()
This kind of sucks. The "verb" of this line of code is flush(), and in most languages the verb of a line of code is the last thing on it. It's what people are used to scanning for. .unwrap()s bury it in the middle of the line, which makes code harder to scan for verbs. Additionally, everybody has "unwrap is a code smell" chanted at them by Rust people "in the know".
So I want to make this go away, but there isn't a sensible thing for me to do if the universe is fucked to the point where flush isn't working, so matching on the result feels like enormous overkill because I don't really know what to do with the error.
io::stdout().flush()?
Reads a hell of a lot better. It communicates what I'm actually trying to do more simply, and scans a lot better. Of course, it only works in functions that return Result<>s, because it's a Result propagation mechanism, not a do-or-die mechanism.
So if I'm a junior programmer, coming from some less strict language, a bit confused about all of this and I want code to read the way I expect it to read coming from other languages, I might start sprinkling in ?s every time I have to deal with these "Result" thingys. Of course, then the compiler yells at me because my caller has to unwrap Results, so I sprinkle in some more ?s and change my return type, and then...etc.
Pretty soon every function in the codebase returns a Result<> just so the code stays more readable and they can punt errors to main and exit, like they're used to.
tl;dr I think we're likely to see junior devs using a lot more Result<>s than they need to, because ? is more readable and "don't use unwrap" is Dogma.