Of course, Go has try/catch, albeit under the keywords panic/recover. The whole idea of not using it, most of the time, except for the case of exceptions, comes from the fact that problems and error handling have shown to not in any way fit well into a standardized structure. Ruby, for example, came to the same realization even before Go. This is something that was already becoming understood before Go was conceived.

Sometimes it works out. Certainly encoding/json in the Go standard library shows that it's quite acceptable to use where appropriate – the programming tools are there to use, but it turns out that it is rarely appropriate. Which is also why most other languages are also trying their best to move away from the practice as a general rule, if it ever was adopted at all.