I write a pretty significant amount of Go code for my day job, and I have written code that calls panic probably less than five times.

There are only really two types of cases where I would even consider it an option.

Firstly, cases where I am handling an error that should never ever happen AND it is the only error case of the function call such that eliminating it removes the need for an error on the return.

The other case is where I have an existing interface without an error return I need to meet and I have a potential error. This is the result of bad interface design in my opinion but sometimes you have to do what you have to do,