An empty or log-only catch block hides failures, leaving the app in an inconsistent state with no diagnostic trail. Always handle, rethrow, or surface caught errors.
Swallowed errors produce silent data corruption and bugs that are nearly impossible to reproduce or debug in production.
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An empty catch {} (or one that only logs) tells the program to continue as if nothing went wrong. The original failure disappears, downstream code runs on bad assumptions, and the real bug surfaces somewhere far away — with no stack trace pointing back to the cause.
// Bad — failure vanishes, execution continues blindly
try {
await saveOrder(order);
} catch {}
// Good — handle it, or rethrow so a boundary can
try {
await saveOrder(order);
} catch (err) {
logger.error({ err, orderId: order.id }, "saveOrder failed");
throw err; // let the caller/boundary decide
}