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

You have complicated non-linear control flow inside a difficult to recognize idiom. So, yes, I think this technique is bad.

It might be worthwhile to spend sometime trying to figure out if this can be written a little nicer.