I don't think anyone actually spend years trying to solve it. It's just that over the years, many people have tried to solve it - each for a grand total of maybe a week or so. If you look at the list, you'll see a lot of different proposal authors: https://seankhliao.com/blog/12020-11-23-go-error-handling-pr... Most of these do not post any other issues and many of those don't even respond in the discussion to their own proposals.
It's a thing that a lot of people coming to the language get frustrated by, think "here is an obvious way to make this better" and file a (usually half-baked) proposal about. It's not a thing that people spend years of focused effort on to polish into something that works.
Compare that to generics: Not only did Ian file a proposal about that roughly every year. The final design also had over a year of intense discussion, with at least a dozen or two consistent participants (and a hundred or so occasional ones). With at least three or four direct iterations.
Error handling is something that a lot of people care a little about.
And yes, I agree that the survey is a better source of data, generally. But I will also say that it intentionally asks as broad a definition of "Go user" as possible. Meaning it also (intentionally) asks people who might use Go every once in a while at work. And a good chunk of respondents are newcomers. These groups are more likely to identify this as a problem. While people who are active on GitHub tend to bias towards people who use it as a daily driver and are much more used to its idioms.
The data is mixed. I fully acknowledge that. But anecdotally, there seems to be a pretty clear pattern that people who come new to the language complain about this, but then get used to it and at the point where they become active in the community, they prefer the status quo. I don't think the experience of newcomers should be dismissed, but I also think it should be acknowledged that it's something most people get used to.
That is, I criticized the strength of the original claim. I didn't try to make an equally strong opposite claim.
This is a bold statement for something so subjective. I'll note that the proposal to leave the status quo as-is is probably one of the most favorably voted Go proposals of all time: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/32825
Go language design is not a popularity contest or democracy (if nothing else because it is not clear who would get a vote). But you won't find any other proposal with thousands of emoji votes, 90% of which are in favor.
I get the criticism and I agree with it to a degree. But boldly stating that criticism as objective and universal is uninformed.