Not just Googlers. There is a certain pragmatism and then there is being stubborn.

How so? I’m not that familiar with Go anymore.

Search any Go codebase for err != nil, for starters.

Well, sure, but this is a problem nearly as old as Go itself. I thought they were referring to larger more recent things, like how generics work, or something to that effect.

> is a problem nearly as old as Go itself

It's as old as C. C and Go are the only two significant languages which end up constantly checking for errors like this.