I completely disagree. If this were true, then machine language would be the clearest code of all.

(Or try telling this to any English teacher or non-fiction writer!)

Bulk is not clarity. Repetitive boilerplate for error handling obscures the actual operations you are performing.

The reason we write in high-level languages is precisely so we can abstract away pieces so we don't always have to think of all the parts at every point in the code!

Don't get me wrong - my code has meticulous, near-obsessive error checking - but a lot of that is possible because I only have to deal with each new possible error I find in that one place and possibly at the error-handling level, if it doesn't get automatically handled perfectly well.