I think those are quite innately related, yes. But I believe you also mix verbosity up in your very next sentence, for what it’s worth — readable, maintainable code is not as close a concept. In fact, certain type of verbosity helps readability, e.g. I argue that Go’s identifier capitalization harms readability, and marking it at a single place by public/private is much better, at a tiny price of more verbosity.

“Clever” code is another topic, there is definitely overly clever code, which is a net negative, but in this particular comparison, is a hand-written, 3-times nested for loop with any number of side effecting statements more clear to read than the “smart” stream/linq expression? I would argue the latter is much more readable and maintainable. For another, even better example there is that math proof, which can be done an order of magnitude faster by choosing a clever notation, but I can’t look up its name yet.

Re error handling, no, go doesn’t force you to handle the errors. It forces you to do some stupid meaningless if err ritual, that won’t result in correct handling of the error case, and will in fact often swallow errors. Java’s checked exception does force you to correctly handle it, though, but even runtime exceptions at least bubble up, making the default action (doing nothing) correct.