Returning -1 is an obvious failure.

What you're saying is that you want your programs to blow up when a function returns a known error (such as "disk full").

One of the points of the article is that C makes you think about all the possible, well-documented, errors that each function can encounter. You know when you write C precisely what can go wrong at each stage, and decide the right way to handle it.

Seeing a dialog box pop up with some exception backtrace is one of the things that annoys me about 'modern' Java-esque languages: they seem to encourage developers to default to ignoring most exceptions.