My experience reading and modifying Go applications has been similar. It often feels like at some point the person writing the code experienced error handling

My experience reading and modifying Go applications has been similar. It often feels like at some point the person writing the code experienced error handling fatigue and all the error cases started blurring together. Every possibility gets explicitly handled, which is impressive, but important common cases that should be a carefully designed part of the system get the same perfunctory treatment as the weird edge cases. Go systems are the only systems I've worked with where silent failures are the most common kind of bug. "But it isn't a silent error; it's in the log and triggered an alert!" Yes, but our customers don't get our alerts. They just get 200s that they don't trust anymore. It makes me think Go's comprehensive error handling can be compared to the performance of C. If you need it, it's great; if you don't need it, the effort you invest in it will detract from something you do need.