Almost every large Go codebase does this with very few exceptions. Until the advent of github.com/pkg/errors there wasn't an easy way to uniformly implement err

Almost every large Go codebase does this with very few exceptions. Until the advent of github.com/pkg/errors there wasn't an easy way to uniformly implement error chaining so people would just prepend strings (if they have any context at all) and used fmt.Errorf religiously. These days, fmt.Errorf is still used but now you can in principle root-cause errors with errors.Cause -- unfortunately many Go libraries do not use github.com/pkg/errors (because of the nested vendor problem that existed for many years) and so you are stuck if you want to root-cause an error in an older library. All of that being said, modern Go (written in the past few years) could avoid these pitfalls. But very few production codebases were both written in the past few years and only use libraries written in the past few years. I've worked on Go codebases for the past 5-6 years.