I usually use Echo which does have an error to return from handlers, but I don't think it's necessarily the wrong thing unless you're writing a library. I used to avoid panics with the same mindset that they aren't supposed to be used like exceptions, but I've found that panics are a clean way to handle a bulk of error cases that are "log and retreat", centralizing the process with some syntactic sugar to not have to check err != nil everywhere. More of my thoughts here if any are curious: https://blog.mukunda.com/cat/2022/dont-be-afraid-to-panic.tx...

I think one thing that could help if the codebase wants to avoid regular panics is more syntactic sugar to help error bubbling, like Rust has.