> You just did prove my point though which is that this is the only argument that Go programmers consider, and they blindly reject that adding more lines of code can harm readability.

Can we lower the rhetorical temperature a notch? Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they're "blindly rejecting" your reasoning. In particular, I'm not just a Go programmer--I've used Java, C#, Python, JS, C++, and C in various professional over the course of my career and I've also played around with dozens of other languages and I have more experience with several of those languages than I have with Go. My opinions are shaped by those other languages at least as much as they're shaped by Go, and indeed I didn't start out having these "pro-Go" opinions--rather, I adopted them over time after allowing my preconceptions to be challenged. Note also that some of my preconceptions haven't changed--I still think sum types and enforced handling of return values are a good idea, for example.