> I am not used to writing code where 2/3 of it is "if err" statements.

I don't write Go, but I have seen this a lot when reading Go. It seems hard to escape. The same is true for pure C. You really need to check every single function output for errors, else errors compound, and it is much harder to diagnose failures. When I write Java with any kind of I/O, I need careful, tight exception handling so that the exception context will be narrow enough to allow me to diagnose failures after unexpected failures. Error handling is hard to do well in any language.