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Yeah. If you're concerned about limiting the amount of additional code one needs to understand in order to use part of a library of code, then the fix is relatively simple: make each function in your library depend on as little of the rest of the library as is possible.

If the author is legitimately concerned about code bloat from the unused parts of a library, Go's linker needs to get a lot smarter.

Wrong as in unethical or prohibited by common licensing? Or just your opinion of the tactic?

It's just against every software engineering best practices. You find a library which implements what you want/need? You don't copy&paste 10% of it into your repository just to make sure it won't ever brake. What if it's broken already? They will fix it and your version won't be updated. This logic is not even ok with your own code, why should it be promoted with somebody else's code?

Exactly. Should be "Meta-W, Ctrl-Y" :)