I actually think it defeats the Go teams stated purpose. It may technically be "more explicit" but it causes too problems. First someone is far more likely to just use the old value, _ trick bedside the current usage is just so annoying. Secondly, it conditions a lot of devs to just skim over the if check, because half the damn time it's just bs.

A little syntax sugar that won't break backwards compatibly and makes the intent of the code clearer is a win-win. I've never seen a really reasonable response from the Go team on why they don't want to do it.