I generally agree that this is a big problem with Go, so I don't want to quibble too much, but the author acknowledges that the language doesn't have enums and that they're just trying to use this feature like enums (TBF, this is common advise on the internet and a lot of code does this): instead the author should be thinking "how do I solve this problem without enums since they don't exist?"

I'd be willing to bet that there's just a better way to do whatever the actual real-world example they want to achieve is (this was not entirely clear to me from the examples in the post).

Like I said though, that doesn't mean that (real) enums wouldn't be an even better way to do it than whatever the Go way is for a given problem, so I don't want to quibble too much since I think this is one of my biggest day-to-day complaints about Go, but it's worth pointing out that the premise can be flawed and that it's still a problem in the language, these two things aren't completely orthogonal.

TL;DR — Instead of pulling in a code generator and another library, it may be good to think of alternate ways to do the same thing without a lot of extra code footprint.