So instead off focusing on those changes I have to first fix potential dozens of files for no reason at all.
You don't have to, if you don't want to upgrade to a new major version.
If you do want to upgrade to a major version, which means that there are breaking changes in a package's API or behavior - you sure as hell want to check the correctness of every single line of code written using that package. Since every file that uses that package must contain an import statement, the import statements are an easily greppable indicator of which files you have to check and potentially fix.
Yes, I do. Doing the monkey job of changing every import line (which will be done with a global search/replace) is definitely not that.
If you're relying on import statements to tell you which files to check, you're definitely doing something wrong
IDEs can even pinpoint those locations without building a project
2. You run tests and they fail if the behavior changed
Literally nowhere is "oh, do an automatic search/replace of imports" is a tool for fixing your project or figuring out necessary changes. Except in go, apparently.
- we don’t need any kind of backwards compatibility, we just update everything.
if you don't care about backwards compatibility, then you can stay on v1 forever. Have you considered a monorepo? That would simplify updating packages and give you the behavior you want.
- For the client to update, it’s not a simple path change in go.mod
if a package moves from v1 to v2, there are breaking changes in either api or behavior. I think this implies more than a simple change to go.mod. This also allows importing both versions of a package if necessary.