I used to be a big goto-error-cleanup proponent, but ultimately gave it up. The resulting code is cleaner, but the bug it's trying to treat (returning without correctly cleaning up) is still too easy. Complicated functions end up with 4-5 cleanup labels and it's hard to look at them and understand the resource acquisition order.
Generally these days I prefer functional decomposition for that (actually honestly I'm preferring C++ RAII style where you get the cleanup for free in almost all cases). That is, do something which requires cleanup (e.g. allocate memory, take a mutex, etc...), call a function to "initialize" the thing you just did, check results and free it on failure. So the allocation and cleanup happen next to each other in the code. Nest as needed for complicated resource strategies, and it scales well. No one is ever confused about what the state is supposed to be.
The problem isn't with 1 resource. It is with 2 or more, right? You successfully allocate the first, but the second fails and so you have to go back and deallocate the first. The goto strategy avoids code repetition.
