To be fair, that is a good principle to follow ;) Non-void, especially pure, functions are much easier to understand in the context of an entire codebase.

> Ignoring an error-only return from a function doesn't produce a warning,

It does if you use the standard set of linters, which with Go you almost certainly do. Go has a strong linting culture, in part due to one being built-in. By the way, in vscode said standard set of linters is one click away in the config.

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There are only 2-3 cases that I know of where failing to handle an error passes by silently. They are edge cases, not something you'll run into writing everyday code.

Go is a language for programminging "in the large" -- it explicitly defers a lot of stuff to layers "above" the compiler, like code review. If you don't buy that as legitimate that's fine!