Great list of why one can love and hate Go. I really did enjoy writing it but you never get the sense that you can be truly certain your code is robust because of subtle behaviour around nil.
I guess as a corollary, Go really rewards writing the dumbest code possible. No advanced type shenanigans, no overuse of interfaces, no complex composition of types. Then you will end up with a very fast, resource light system that just runs forever.
To be fair, checking if an interface is nil is very dumb code, and the fact that it doesn't work is one of my biggest gripes with the language. In this case it's clearly the language (creators) who's dumb
Interface is just behavior. That is the main difference from other languages. Go is about "what", not "who". So when you are checking for nil, you are essentially asking whether the variable has any logic it can perform. And that can happen only if some behavior was provided, ie. it is not nil.