That's a huge pain point, but I'm curious! What would be a good approach in your opinion? I'm not questioning the exit/print error and carry on, that's plainly wrong.
When working on private projects/libs, my functions usually return an enum error type, and do all data handling - be it arguments or returns - through pointers passed as args; I mean, I think that's the usual convention, but you clearly have way more experience, so I thought about asking! :)
Looking at you, syscall!