I personally (emphasis intentional) consider the core distinction between "references" and "pointers" to be whether you can do pointer arithmetic on the pointers. Pointers without pointer arithmetic aren't hardly scary at all, especially in languages where there is no way to deallocate the underlying value but leave the pointer behind such that it may point to the wrong thing later, be that due to something like Rust or with GC like Go.

So personally, I think of Go as having references, but not pointers (outside of unsafe).

Of course every language community uses those terms its own way, but that seems to me to be the most broadly useful way of looking at it.

Your asterisk got interpreted as italicization and screwed up your post.

Pointer arithmetic is possible in Go via the unsafe package.

Here is an example.

    buff := (*[25][80][2]byte)(unsafe.Pointer(uintptr(addr) + 25))