The assumption here being that if you do not have exceptions, one must write all the intermediate code. That exceptions are the only way of avoiding this.

While in Go this may be the case, it is not true in general. One could use an error monad to achieve the exact same thing, albeit in a much safer manner.

Sure, and in some next generation language yet to be invented you might not even need the error monad!

But we're talking Go here.