One of the most common issues (from surveys, etc) that Go users want to see addressed is verbose error checking, and this proposal is to add some syntactic sugar to make one of the more common error checking idioms less verbose, in order to address that specific issue.
You are suggesting that they implement a metaprogramming system (and then build this solution on top of that) instead? On the grounds that it will reduce cognitive load overall?
Surely that is a drastically more difficult solution to the problem this is meant to address. I think it might be difficult to implement that in a way that maintains key properties of Go (like consistently fast compile times), and it might add a lot more work to tooling that needs to understand code like editors etc. And although that would allow each Go project to invent their own error handling mechanisms, and some projects might benefit from that, there's clear downsides to that as well.
You are suggesting that they implement a metaprogramming system (and then build this solution on top of that) instead? On the grounds that it will reduce cognitive load overall?
Surely that is a drastically more difficult solution to the problem this is meant to address. I think it might be difficult to implement that in a way that maintains key properties of Go (like consistently fast compile times), and it might add a lot more work to tooling that needs to understand code like editors etc. And although that would allow each Go project to invent their own error handling mechanisms, and some projects might benefit from that, there's clear downsides to that as well.