> The culture of single letter variables in golang, at least in the codebases I've seen, undoes this.

The convention, not just in Go, is that the smaller the scope, the smaller the variable reference.

So, sure, you're going to see single-letter variables in short functions, inside short block scopes, etc, but that is true of almost any language.

I haven't seen single-letter variables in Go that are in a scope that isn't short.

Of course, this could just mean that I haven't seen enough of other peoples Go source.