I've been 99% a Go developer since 2015-ish, and this is not something I've ever encountered, in general people just don't leave unused variables lying around. The compile time check does highlight logic errors frequently enough though, so I'm very glad it's there.
It's mostly a problem when you're in the middle of writing something and you're trying to figure out what's going wrong, so you start commenting stuff out... And now you have un-used variables that you have to rename to _ for no good reason. It just adds busywork.
It would be nice if Zig had statement- and expression-level comments, similar to how most Lisps let you comment out whole S-exprs (which still have to be valid). Then it could allow variables that are referenced only from such comments.
More often than not I end up creating variables for a bunch of chained function calls just to get the debugger output right, I might be holding it wrong though.
