I write a lot of scripts that engineers need to run. I used to really try to make things ‘fail soft’ so that even if one piece failed the rest of the script would keep running and let you know which components failed and what action you needed to take to fix the problem.
Eventually I had so many issues with people assuming that any errors that didn’t result in a failure were safe to ignore and crucial manual steps were being missed. I had to start making them ‘fail hard’ and stop completely when a step failed because it was the only way to get people to reliably perform the desired manual step.
Trying to predict and account for other people’s behavior is really tricky, particularly when a high level of precision is required.