This is my experience after 7 years of Go as well. Error handling is actually fine. People make too big a deal about the error check (and Rust people make too big a deal about the compiler not forcing you to handle every error). The substantial opportunities to improve error handling involve establishing a standard, typesafe interface for getting at the relevant, structured information in an error so callers can handle things properly; however this probably depends on generics and sum types and will probably look a lot like Rust’s result types (which seems great to me). In practice these are not where your bugs are. On the other hand, sum types would actually go a long way in reducing bugs (including the nil pointer problems you mention).
