Do you consider this technique “BAD”?

Question

Sometimes you need to skip execution of part of a method under certain non-critical error conditions. You can use exceptions for that, but exceptions generally are not

Answer 1

What you're trying to do is non-local failure recovery. This is what goto is for. Use it. (actually, this is what exception handling is for -- but if you can't use that, 'goto' or 'setjmp/longjmp' are the next best thing).

This pattern, the if(succeeded(..)) pattern, and 'goto cleanup', all 3 are semantically and structurally equivalent. Use whichever one is most common in your code project. There's much value in consistency.

I would caution against if(failed(..)) break; on one point in that you're producing a surprising result should you try to nest loops:

do{
   bool isGood = true;
   .... some code
   if(!isGood)
       break;
   .... some more code
   for(....){
      if(!isGood)
          break; // <-- OOPS, this will exit the 'for' loop, which 
                 //  probably isn't what the author intended
      .... some more code
   }
} while(false);
..... some other code, which has to be executed.

Neither goto cleanup nor if(succeeded(..)) have this surprise, so I'd encourage using one of these two instead.