The error handing is terrible and it's well known it's a problem. It's a really bad situation. It's not to say you can't do anything with the language, just that you need to really understand the tools and strategies that mitigate the deficiencies and be prepared from day 1 to exercise them, or your project is in for growing pains.

What's more, I do not think the community has "solved" for those strategies. I know google internally has one set of guidelines, but other teams and orgs do other stuff.

Quite frankly, there are many aspects of its design that ended up being sub-optimal for large codebases. Look at the profound about-face the language took on bundling as an example.

We can bandy about all we want about this, but uh... certainly as a longtime user of Kubernetes I can say, "They have found ways to deal with the language's error handling."