I'm curious because I've never felt it being onerous nor felt like there was much friction. Perhaps because I've primarily built web applications and web APIs, it's very common to simply let the exception bubble up to global middleware and handle it at a single point (log, wrap/transform). Then most of the code doesn't really care about exceptions.
The only case where I might add explicit exception handling probably falls into a handful of use cases when there is a desire to a) retry, b) log some local data at the site of failure, c) perform earlier transform before rethrowing up, d) some cleanup, e) discard/ignore it because the exception doesn't matter.
When we were rewriting some code from PHP to Go, I remember that simply thinking about "what to do with err" led me to realize we had a ticking time bomb - one that could explode in production. We had never realized that a certain line of PHP code could potentially throw an exception, and letting it bubble up the stack would have resulted in data corruption. With Go's explicit error handling, this issue became immediately obvious.
Also, ignoring an error condition (by either forgetting about it, or simply doing the nice and tidy if err dance with no real error handling in place, just a log or whatever) is much worse and can lead to silent data corruption.
We rely on linters to catch that, which is pretty easy to implement (no expensive intra-procedural analysis needed, which is the case with exceptions).
>Go can abort at any point as well.
Panics, unlike errors, are exceptional situations which generally should not be caught (a programming error, like index out of range). They're usually much rarer than errors.