Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incidentally, your link includes a great example of Go's error handling - which is inevitably what actually happens in languages without exceptions: errors are silenced and the program marches on, each step making less sense than the previous. It's a good talking point that you can always check error values - but it never really happens, in part because library designers try to avoid putting the burden on themselves…
The hundreds of high quality Go packages that do handle errors are an existence proof against your argument. Look at nearly anything on godoc.org. You didn't cite that quote. I am certain whoever said it is doing something silly.
Are you saying that:
* Getenv doesn't return an empty string for a non-existent env var?
* Go JSON parser doesn't return an empty list given an empty string?
That you can handle errors without exceptions needn't have an existence proof... The question is how many errors are silenced. Stats will be hard to come by. But getenv and JSON parsing are pretty basic functionality and in most languages with exceptions they would not silence errors. (say, Python's json.loads barfs and os.getenv returns None which unlike the empty string will almost certainly lead to an exception if the code won't account for None). So it's a good anecdote in the absence of hard data.