Likewise, I've seen a lot of Go that is far away from the idomatic Go heaven that is the standard library. Although that happens in every language as soon as there's reasonable complexity.

As for the "space shuttle" term, it's more of a euphemism for "do not even attempt to refactor this mess, it's so complex that you'll surely fuck up if you do, and you'll make it harder for the one guy who can actually understand this"

"else/else if" is not used very often in Go.

It's not used very often here, either. Despite their claims at the top of the code of every `if` having a corresponding `else`, there are 140 `if`s, but only 20 `else`s and a mere 5 `else if`s.

Most of the ifs are for early termination. Using an else on one of these is wasteful.