I agree, but would also point out that panic isn't necessarily going to exit a program, recover exists and it isn't that uncommon for programs or libraries to do a deferred recover at the beginning of goroutines so that a panic within that goroutine will only kill off that goroutine and allow the main goroutine and other goroutines to continue.

Of course this "pattern" should only be used when you're sure that that one failing goroutine won't have a cascading impact on other goroutines that are still running.