The MVS choices will be encoded into the go.mod; you may have been correct in the past, but as the post mentions transitive dependencies have been incorporated

The MVS choices will be encoded into the go.mod; you may have been correct in the past, but as the post mentions transitive dependencies have been incorporated since Go 1.17. So yes, really: the only point of go.sum is to enable checking the integrity of dependencies, as a nice double-check against the sumdb itself.