Comment by vacuity

I would think it's a mix of not being sure exactly what to do on error and not wanting to undergo the effort of writing error logic. You have to switch from "basic skeletal structure of the program" to "cover all bases", which isn't simple. So it's easy to have no or rudimentary error handling, and by the time you want to change it, it's hard to change. Like, "malloc can fail, but it would be a lot easier right now if I assume it won't".