I'm open to alternatives, but I haven't experienced any language constructs that strike as good of a balance between forcing you to handle errors/options when a function indicates it returns them, and allowing you to do so without too much ceremony. I don't think match is enough on it's own, but when combined with if-let/let-else/?-operator I don't feel like I'm sacrificing significant time and effort in dealing with Results/Options, so I'm not encouraged to cut corners and write worse code to avoid returning them in the first place.

The idiomatic way to write Go discourages you from robust error handling; return an opaque error, which callers will probably deal with as a string (or bubble-up as much as possible) because knowing its potential concrete types requires either reading source code or having documentation available (as the idiomatic function return type won't tell you anything about it). The path of least resistance only goes as far as forcing you to acknowledge there might be an error, it doesn't help you make good decisions about how to deal with it.

I think without also having to learn about lifetimes and dealing with async that this still presents an attractive trade-off for people who want to be quickly productive and don't care as much about garbage collection.