That isn't a typical nill/null exception, like in JavaScript, ruby, and python. That's in a language where a lot of values are non-nullable, and some of the ones that are have zero-values that can be used without getting a nil pointer exception.
https://go.dev/tour/moretypes/12So, there's a good chance was an error that was really unexpected and it's better to show the error than to risk producing bad output.
