That was my reaction too, but it does point the way to a more subtle chronic ache in coding Go: the efficiency<->simplicity tradeoff between passing some large struct to a function by reference, or by copying.

The former, "by reference" is guaranteed to impose no increase in calling overhead, irrespective of the compiler's ability to optimize the object code, however fat the struct eventually grows.

The latter, "by copying" guarantees the calling function will upon return find all fields of the struct just as before -- a great aid to understanding during code review.