The anti-pattern is to rely on codesize = 0 for some security purpose, to prevent some kind of abuse that a contract could execute.
But there are other very common use cases. What you mention about Solidity is one of them. The other are ERCs like ERC-721 that execute a callback on the receiver of a token and expect the callback to succeed and return a specific value, but only if the receiver is a contract with codesize > 0.
So raising an exception would be very bad in both of those cases, as would returning 0.
A potentially good alternative that works with both use cases would be to basically return a boolean value depending on whether the codesize is zero or non-zero, maybe represented as 0 and uint256_max or some large value.