So what you're doing there is adding a control to try to mitigate the consequences of a language failing. Go doesn't actually prevent you from getting this wrong, but a linter such as go vet can flag cases where it suspects you screwed up, and maybe you'll catch the worst mistakes most of the time this way and by having usage conventions.

We shouldn't mistake this for equivalent capability. The complicated cases that tempt people to ignore or switch off such linting are exactly the cases most likely to have an undetected problem.

So this is "RAII like" only in the sense that "Just remember to do it properly" is RAII like, and we could make exactly the same claim for C.

RAII destructors, on the other hand, do not permit the coder (at the use site of the type) to forget, as the destructor is invoked automatically when the variable goes out of scope.

In my time reviewing Python (also GC, "with" provides a similar functionality), this is a very common error.