it's not that terrible in languages with abstraction
But truth is it is the programmers who are lazy, we should not blame language for providing a feature which some programmer abuse.
I have never seen a Java programmer profiling their code for Memory or CPU at work and I am here running my shitty C code under Valgrind and a profiler all the time.
I guess, it is programmers and not the language.
Go's error != nil approach though rudimentary actually forces lazy programmers to complain, since they cannot abuse it.