But the most common pattern is a sequence of calls to functions that return an optional error plus the happy path value, followed by a short circuiting check of the error, followed by a call to another function with the happy path value as an argument. It's very common to have a chain of these kinds of calls making up the body of a function.
It seems like "return err" is very useful for this pattern, if I understand you correctly. A function returning the error from the first call it makes that fails, or the happy path value if all the calls succeed. Seems like it should be possible to bake that pattern into the language, but its tricky doing it a way that doesn't obfuscate the underlying semantics, which is very important to many Go developers.