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The explanation of the rationale for this method existing is a good primer on the footguns of go's "type system".

It could be used, in my opinion, as a litmus test for go developers: if the explanation does not make complete sense to you, then you should think twice about implementing anything substantial (basically any use of interfaces or pointers) in golang (myself included)

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any use of interfaces? No way, man. Any use of reflect? Sure.

Yes, "nil interface vs nil value" is _eminently_ unintuitive and incredibly easy to get wrong:

https://dev.to/mokiat/the-dark-side-of-go-interfaces-1541

I dunno, ISTM it's like complaining that "0" != 0 in Go (it does in weakly typed languages like JS). A nil pointer and a nil interface are different types, and Go lets you call methods on nil pointers, so it would be weird if it treated nil pointers as special interface values.

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