All error handling is messy in one way or another. I am personally a fan of the exceptions in C#. It’s good enough for me and doesn’t make me add a bunch of error types to all my methods.
I also like the Erlang philosophy of letting the lightweight process crash as soon as any problem occurs and having a supervisor decide what to do.
Then you need an alternative.
And that alternative is...messy. Do you have exceptions? Do you type them? Or do you have explicit return values? Is there syntax sugar? Etc, etc.