In older web languages, like PHP, I would reckon it’s like making a self-http call where you don’t care about the result and just want to trigger some work elsewhere in the application async. I guess with Go channels, you’d lose out on concurrency, automatic retries (depending on infra), and debuggability — you could do the same with Go and http calls though and just drop the channels completely.

But yeah, sometimes things break. We rely on things like nginx options to retry GET requests and idempotency in the design; failing gracefully (via a shutdown callback to always return something to a caller); ensuring work is completed before writing a successful response anywhere, along with being idempotent; and, ensuring there’s observability in every long-running task.