I agree with that assessment. It's impossible to disagree because the designers have been very explicit about their motivations.
My argument was only that multivalue error returns are not necessarily so limiting. Rather, IME they're a great compromise that can permit the best of both worlds. I always wondered why Lua's idiom was never picked up by Go. So much of Go seems lifted wholesale from Lua, or at least a shared ancestor. Particularly Go's goroutines, lexical closures, and how cleanly they interoperate; both of those constructs are much more limited in languages other than Go or Lua because of shortcuts taken to simplify the [pre-existing, broken] implementations (e.g. JavaScript and Python). But especially Go's exception mechanism, with syntax and semantics likewise almost identical to Lua's.
My argument was only that multivalue error returns are not necessarily so limiting. Rather, IME they're a great compromise that can permit the best of both worlds. I always wondered why Lua's idiom was never picked up by Go. So much of Go seems lifted wholesale from Lua, or at least a shared ancestor. Particularly Go's goroutines, lexical closures, and how cleanly they interoperate; both of those constructs are much more limited in languages other than Go or Lua because of shortcuts taken to simplify the [pre-existing, broken] implementations (e.g. JavaScript and Python). But especially Go's exception mechanism, with syntax and semantics likewise almost identical to Lua's.