It's easy to criticise this from a visual glance but you have to remember that proper error handling in any language is hard work and often produces ugly code where you need to account for multiple edge cases - many of which aren't serious enough to cause an exception but would still break the program's logic. All Go does is group these conditions into a standard interface.

Furthermore, because Go does unify these conditions, I've found it effective for handling a whole array of differing edge cases that I might have otherwise overlooked. In that regard I've anecdotally found it more effective than most of the habits you see in other languages (I can't say all languages because I haven't used every language out there, but I have developed in excess of a dozen different programming languages over the last 30 years).

In short, in Go error handling becomes a first class citizen rather than a byproduct you begrudgingly need to check for.

Also while it might not be to everyone's tastes, adding "if err != nil {" really does add practically nothing to your overall dev time in real terms.

But I'm not here to advocate one method of error handling over another, nor to try and convince anyone to use Go who might not have otherwise. Obviously you can see I get a little frustrated when people judge it purely on face value but that's because I have spent some time with the language and found it to be surprisingly effective at delivering a stable product.