It's my comment you're referring to (linked from the post). The full sentence was “BTW, TeX's error handling is phenomenally good IMO; the opposite of the situation with LaTeX.” You've reversed the meaning(!) but I stand by my original comment: I invite you to try plain TeX (instead of LaTeX) for a few weeks/months, and see how you feel about the way it handles errors.
Unlike LaTeX, where the (TeX) error messages usually appear arbitrary / incomprehensible / unrelated to what you're doing, in TeX (IMO) all the error messages are very informative and include a lot of information and give you ways to recover from your problem and poke around, get more context, etc. First you'll have to have read a manual (or I recommend A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy), but my claim is about the user experience in the steady state.
Of course, part of the reason is that LaTeX is much more complicated than the low-level things one may be doing with plain TeX. Another reason is that the LaTeX authors were working with severe constraints, one of which was of their own choosing: their choice of using TeX macros as a “programming language” (which it was never intended to be, and at which is it horrible). Nevertheless, a big part of the reason is that they were trying so hard to make things "easy" for the user in the typical case that they didn't care as much about ways in which things can go wrong and how surprising errors can be.
Unlike LaTeX, where the (TeX) error messages usually appear arbitrary / incomprehensible / unrelated to what you're doing, in TeX (IMO) all the error messages are very informative and include a lot of information and give you ways to recover from your problem and poke around, get more context, etc. First you'll have to have read a manual (or I recommend A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy), but my claim is about the user experience in the steady state.
Of course, part of the reason is that LaTeX is much more complicated than the low-level things one may be doing with plain TeX. Another reason is that the LaTeX authors were working with severe constraints, one of which was of their own choosing: their choice of using TeX macros as a “programming language” (which it was never intended to be, and at which is it horrible). Nevertheless, a big part of the reason is that they were trying so hard to make things "easy" for the user in the typical case that they didn't care as much about ways in which things can go wrong and how surprising errors can be.