Similarly, it’s a bit broken that you see the perception check failed notifications. Like, ok, I don’t know what is there, but I know something is there. In real life I’d have no idea and I’d go on about my day.
Yeah, and if you didn’t see the failures, you wouldn’t be tempted to save scum. I can see why they’d leave the notifications in by default; there’s potentially a ton of content locked behind these kinds of checks. But I’d appreciate the option to turn them off.
In 5th edition you are not supposed to know; this is what the Passive Perception score is for. If you’re not specifically looking for anything, the DM is supposed to use your Passive Perception instead of rolling a check that would alert you to the existence of something hidden; if you are specifically looking, you roll Perception whether or not there is anything to find.