> it infuriates me when third-party stuff in other languages throws exceptions and you end up needing to check everything anyway. exceptions are a curse.

Anything can panic in Go. Go gives absolutely no guarantee something cannot panic. Errors as values are just a convention. So exceptions are a curse but Go has an inferior exception system, panics, but they are still exceptions.

The solution is checked exceptions.

It's fine if you think exceptions are bad, but throwing out the ability to easily determine where an error occurred (and might I add, from having seen go code in practice, having humans just become meat-based manual exception-handlers bubbling errors up to the top) is throwing the baby and the bathtub and the entire bathroom out with the bath water.

Errors are part of the third-party stuff's API. Don't be surprised if you have to handle them.