Although Go is a statically typed language, it has some degree of type inference to make your life easier and less bureaucratic. However, this type inference is limited to within a single function, so Go won't do things like infer the return type of your function for you even though it could. When I first started writing Go code (at the time, primarily coming from Python), I found this limitation irritating. The Go compiler could perfectly well see the types involved (and would complain if I got them wrong), so it felt annoying that it made me declare them again. Over time, I've come to appreciate this limitation and find it a good thing.

The obvious problem you avoid by limiting type inference to only within a single function is what I will call 'spooky type errors at a distance'. If return types can be inferred, you can have an entire chain of functions with inferred return types; you call A who calls B who calls C who calls D, and you use the result in some way that requires it to be of a type (or compatible with an interface). Now suppose D changes its return type. This change in return type will propagate up through the chain of inferred types until it hits your function and generates a type error where the new inferred type isn't compatible with what you're doing with it any more. D's type change has propagated to cause errors not in C but in you, far away from the change itself.

(One advantage of the type error happening in C is that C is the code that directly deals with D, and so it's the code and the people who are most familiar with what's going on, what they could change to deal with it, and so on. You and your function may have no real understanding of D or even have never heard of it before.)

Avoiding spooky type errors at a distance also means that you avoid arguments and decisions about where they should be fixed. With specified return types, if D's return type changes either C must fix it or change its own API by visibly changing its return type. If return types are inferred, you could maybe fix this anywhere in the call stack, from you on down. Each different fix would probably have different implications, some of them hard to track. With fixed return types, you avoid all that; it's always clear who has to change next and what the likely consequences are.

As a consequence of all of this, the effects of changing a return type are much more visible and obvious. With type inference for return types, you can tell yourself that no one will notice right up until the point that actually someone does. I've done this in my own Python code, when I forgot that some usage far away from the equivalent of function D depended on some property that I was now silently changing.

Since Go is designed in the service of large scale software engineering, I think this is the right trade-off for Go to make. Spooky action at a distance is exactly what you don't want in something designed for large scale software engineering, because that far off thing is probably written and maintained by an entirely different bunch of people from you. Even spooky action at a distance within your own package makes the effects and impact of changes less clear. Being straightforward is an advantage.

(When imagining a hypothetical Go with return type inference, let's assume that you don't allow type inference across package boundaries, because going that far opens a very large can of worms. This would mean that exported names had different type rules than unexported ones.)