And an interator over multiple directories would maybe also fail once
it finds the one "broken" directory.
One iteration might fail but nicely because others succeed. Yes, in theory should not be found any invalid entry in that folder but integraring 3rd party proprietary packages, it could happen and it is much easier to generalise the approach rather than fix that packages.
Moreover, why not something like
depmod -a ${KERNEL_VERSION}
After all, the opposite of a generalisation is a specific call that cannot fails.
I hope this helps, R-