I've been using Go for 7 years and I don't think this is a mischaracterization at all. I definitely don't think it's something "only really novice Go developers do"--I see it all the time, including in popular open source libraries and even the standard library. I don't think it's contentious that Go's error handling needs some improvement (by which I mean "more standard, structured error handling" and not "syntax support for eliminating error handling boilerplate"--the latter is more contentious as far as I'm aware).