We have a small library of functions for sweeping up error returns, and for collecting errors from multiple functions and checking them all at once. It helps a lot.

Golang is very much on to something with it's "errors are values" philosophy, but I'd be the first to acknowledge that it's not a fully baked philosophy. It is weird to discover fundamental things about how to structure basic code several years into writing in a language, but that happens somewhat regularly with Go.