>Also why is RAII bad? It's an awesome feature in C++

I didn't mean it's bad (I used to be a C++ developer myself and enjoyed RAII a lot), just wondering what are the alternatives that the OP doesn't consider "hacks". RAII would require to introduce constructors/destructors in the language, with all the gotchas (and probably you'll want a full-fledged OOP after that), which is apparently against Go's design principles as a simple language.

>Auto-Closable interface with syntactic support.

I don't see much difference here in practice; the whole difference is that in C#, for example, you use "using" on a whole object, while in Go it's a "defer" on a specific method of the object (or a standalone function). You are not limited to a single method and can use it on any method you deem necessary.

Auto-closeable/RAII, however, is less flexible in ad hoc situations specific to a certain function (you have to define dummy classes just to make sure a function is called no matter what), Go allows to use "defer" on a lambda. Auto-closeable also ties control flow to an object, which makes sense in an OOP-focused language, but Go isn't one.

I agree with most of your points, but I wanted to also point out that you don't need C++'s ctor/dtor spaghetti to have useful RAII: Rust achieves it without even having first-class constructors (and opt-in custom destructors via Drop).