Don’t know what to tell you, I have personally made this mistake and not had this caught by the compiler. I haven’t used go in several years at this point, so it’s entirely possible this is a newly-caught scenario by the compiler.
Regardless, the fundamental point stands. Using tuples to return “meaningless” values alongside errors allows developers to mistakenly use those meaningless values.
Go doesn't allow values to just be referenced without having some use, e.g., JavaScript's `"use strict";` hack could not be done.
In general, I have never seen a bug caused by accidentally ignoring an error. It's a theoretical concern, but not a real world problem.