You're the second person to make this claim, which seems wildly unintuitive to me.

Why not write in machine language, then?

Mindlessly repetitive control structures make the code harder to read, not easier.

It also makes any sort of functional code obscure as you can't chain function calls if you have to check an error code each time.

And it's error prone too. There are all these tiny codepaths everywhere that are never tested. Or if you add a return code to a function and another developer has used that function in another branch and is not checking the return code that doesn't exist in his branch, there's just no way for that developer to later tell that he's checking in wrong code.

Almost every programming language in the world uses whitespace to mark off control structures, even if, like in C++, it's not syntactically useful, so clearly an awful lot of people like whitespace for this very purpose.