Basically if you need to manipulate pointers, use safe pointers and keep track of pointer ownership. This is how modern C++ and Rust work.

If you don't need to manipulate pointers then nil really just represents a degenerate or optional value. For optional values these can be encoded any number of ways depending on the type system. One common pattern is an optional type. Another is to annotate the type to indicate that it might be null.

The idea is that if a programmer doesn't check that an nullable or optional type is missing then the program should fail at compile time instead of crashing at runtime. Golang chose to crash programs at runtime.

So for whatever reason, Go has decided that null pointer dereferences are not a big deal. But God help you if you try to comment out a variable use without assigning it to "_". Then the program fails to compile.