We're talking about a read-only case. os.Open returns a read-only file handle. If you try writing to it, you'll get an error already at that point. If close fails, who cares?

> I'm not sure how they would handle a file close failure

Ideally there is some kind of failover you can resort to, but if there is no other option at very least you will want to notify a human that what they thought was written isn't actually. But when only reading, you don't need to fall back to anything – all the reads were successful – and what is it to the human? What they thought was supposed to happen did!