Another way of potentially addressing this problem: add some kind of macro facility to Go – maybe take inspiration from Rust

This could be used to solve both "syntactic support for error handling", and also various other common complaints (such as lack of first class enums), without "polluting" the core language – they'd be optional packages which nobody would have to use if they don't want to

Of course, if one of these optional packages ever became truly prevalent, you could promote it to the standard library... but that would involve far less bikeshedding, because it would be about making the de facto standard de jure... and arguably, letting people vote with their feet is a much more reliable way of establishing consensus than any online discussion could ever be