There was just so much nonsense back in the day around Go's error handling and about how it was so much more straightforward than adding exceptions to the language.

In reality, the only reason why errors in Go work the way they do is that it kept the runtime simpler by offloading checking to the developer. The alternative would've been for Go to support sum types, which would've helped make error handling a lot saner, but that was dismissed because they overlapped a little with structurally-typed interfaces (Go's one really good idea). Oh, and the stupid hack that is 'iota'.

And then Go eventually ended up badly re-inventing most of what exceptions do with errors.Is(), errors.As(), and fmt.Errorf("%w", err).

It's such a hot mess.