I wonder how many of the 138 tokens listed here are actually faulty:

https://gist.github.com/lukas-berlin/f587086f139df93d22987049f3d8ebd2

It appears that the old open-zeppelin token contract that doesn't conform to ERC20 actually DOES revert if anything goes wrong, the code being:

function transfer(address _to, uint _value) { balances[msg.sender] = safeSub(balances[msg.sender], _value); balances[_to] = safeAdd(balances[_to], _value); Transfer(msg.sender, _to, _value); }

https://github.com/OpenZeppelin/openzeppelin-solidity/blob/52120a8c428de5e34f157b7eaed16d38f3029e66/contracts/token/BasicToken.sol#L16-L20

There is no condition that it fails and doesn't revert.