As someone who writes a lot of Go I have mixed feelings about it. The problem is that there are implicit errors regardless and the explicitness in err != nil tricks beginners into thinking that they've covered all edge cases, they haven't. Recover() is probably the only way to handle internal panics and even then it only works if you know to that internal call might call panic().

That said I can't think of an alternative other then to reduce the number of panic()s hidden in various libraries.