That's just not true. Let's say you have a form validation library with a public api that supports custom validators Validate(name string, value string) bool. Then you decide that your validator now needs to make an HTTP request. This request needs context so that tracing is propagated and needs to return (bool, error) so that error is propagated up instead of silently ignoring it or logging it and returning false. This is coloring. You can use context.Background the same way you can use blocking in other languages. It just doesn't feel right and it breaks things.