If you need to screw something and you have a choice between
1. A screwdriver
2. Electric drill A
3. Electric drill B
you will certainly look funny at someone considering the screwdriver over the alternatives.
Someone who automatically narrows this choice between the two electric drills is not "attached to their tools", as you say. They are just picking the better tool.
Of course, others will disagree - fine. But to argue that e.g. Java is definitely the screwdriver is a subjective judgement.
The use of please-check-this error conditions instead of something like a Try<T, E> (Result<V, E> in Rust) and an inability to just map over these as 0- or 1-element collections is such a huge pain, and it certainly does matter when you're piling up multiple error-handling cases. Even more when you'd otherwise use Scala's `recover` to get back on a happy path. Go's inexpressivity directly impinges on one's ability to get things done.
(Food for thought: forgetting to handle the error case from Rust's Result<V, E> is a compiler error. Is "if err != nil" really that good an idea in such a universe?)
result, _ := someFunc()