This took a while for me to get used to coming from Java/Python to Go but I'm very much a convert now - or at least it makes perfect sense for the sorta of Go services we write. It always forces me to think, can this thing fail in normal operation or is this exceptional. If former, it's an error value that eventually should be returned to the client in some form. If latter, it's a panic and I'll see it in Sentry and know I probably have something to fix.