Programming in Go since 10 years and I do not have to worry about nil pointers. You seem to assume that the possibility of a pointer being nil is something that is complicated, a burden to the programmer and a source of runtime bugs. It's not. At least not in Go. At least not something you have to worry about in practice.
I'm glad you've had a good experience, but yes it is a source of runtime bugs.
One piece of code from a well established tech company would just crashloop if authentication failed. I've seen others just die if the RPC service couldn't make a connection.
So in practice, yes I do have to spend my time tracking down nil pointer runtime bugs both from colleagues and also from other organizations.
In my experience I've not had too many issues because of it (due to good testing) but it definitely requires more effort of me. If they didn't exist I'd be much more productive
