Which is what should be discussed about go, rather than if-err clauses. That is hardly an issue in go. But Go has these little quirks which, if not careful, can become a problem. But instead most go critiques discuss only the error handling syntax. Look at the other comments.

The article is on point on the strengths of go, and in many cases, those other languages you say, you will find it really hard to do the same thing with the ease with which you can do in go.

What the article glosses over, is the footguns with working with the language. No compile time nil checks, implicit interfaces, lack of sum types, like you said, which more so often leads to bloated structs, member visibility which is just private and public. You can find more.

But these problems were not the main focus of go. Go was build because google devs wanted a simpler way to manage and deploy their software across thousands of services, not having to wait forever for their code to compile, not worrying about writing cpp code in the BEST possible industry standard, ability to do parallel processing of hundreds or thousands of workloads without choking your cpu, managing dependency hell. These were actual roadblocks. And google was not the only one facing these problems. Go solved all of it. Which language was solving this before go?