I'd welcome the ternary conditional operator but I hope exception handling never gets introduced (at least as I'm used to it from Java, C#, JS, etc.).

Exceptions should not be conflated with regular error handling, especially when they're allowed to bubble up from anywhere. I very much appreciate that functions that can return errors force the caller to deal with them, for the most part. True exceptions can already be thrown with panic, although I actually find it incredibly rare that I need to reach for that tool. I'd argue that when people talk about exceptions they almost always actually want "unhappy path" error handling.

Now, if Go wanted to add a sleeker way to handle those errors, similar to Rust's approach, I'd be very interested. Minimum three lines for every call to a function that returns an error does get a bit verbose, arguably hurting readability. A little sugar could improve readability without making error handling implicit.