Well the other end of the spectrum of surfacing complexity of errors would be idiomatic Golang code. But then half your code becomes "if err != nil" error hand

Well the other end of the spectrum of surfacing complexity of errors would be idiomatic Golang code. But then half your code becomes "if err != nil" error handling. In many scenarios error handling can be automated because the essence of what you typically do when there are errors is to short-circuit the rest of the function and surface the error the user. If you are doing it the same way each time, you might as well abstract it. In some cases you may want to make things explicit and force the programmer to deal with them. But if it is just boilerplate, then it becomes noise, and an excessive amount of noise prevents the programmer from thinking at a higher level of abstraction. Due to limits of human cognition / mental bandwidth (7 +/- 2 concepts at a time), abstraction compresses the number of concepts you need to concern yourself with, and that means you can focus more on the problem domain and less on boilerplate. The key to this though is learning new concepts and abstractions. Each abstraction compresses multiple thoughts into 1, freeing up cognitive bandwidth. The more concepts and abstractions you know, the more efficient and higher level thoughts you can have. But that requires time to learn and master. You might also have lots of junior programmers on a team, in which case they are not familiar with many higher level abstractions and they will not be able to work on a codebase, so you have to keep that in balance.