Resolving Dialyzer "Function foo/n has no local return" errors

Dialyzer is a great static analysis tool for Erlang and has helped me catch many bugs related to what types I thought I was passing to a function versus what actually gets passed. Some of the errors Dialyzer emits are rather cryptic at first (as seems commonplace in the Erlang language/environment in general) but after you understand the causes of the errors, the fix is easily recognized. My most common error is Dialyzer inferring a different return type that what I put in my -spec, followed by Dialyzer telling me the same function has no local return. An example:

foo.erl:125: The specification for foo:init/1 states that the function might also return {'ok',tuple()} but the inferred return is none()
foo.erl:126: Function init/1 has no local return

The init/1 function (for a gen\_server, btw):

-spec(init/1 :: (Args :: list()) -> tuple(ok, tuple())).
init(_) ->
  {ok, #state{}}.

And the state record definition:

-record(state, {
  var_1 = {} :: tuple(string(), tuple())
  ,var_2 = [] :: list(tuple(string(), tuple()))
}).

Spot the error? In the record definition, var\₁ is initialized to an empty tuple and var\₂ is initialized to an empty list, yet the spec typing for the record does not take that into account. The corrected version:

-record(state, {
  var_1 = {} :: tuple(string(), tuple()) | {}
  ,var_2 = [] :: list(tuple(string(), tuple())) | []
}).

And now Dialyzer stops emitting the spec error and the no local return error.