> It seems that people who come from a language with tuples have a hard time dealing with the difference or realizing they are different.

The problem is that Go only has the drawbacks of MRV and leverages essentially none of the advantages.

> Go and various other languages, didn't need or didn't want to lean on tuples as much.

As far as I’m concerned go would be a strictly better language if it had tuples (or even just the ability to unpack structs).

All the nonsense about foo/foo2 to handle both single and multiple results would go away, and pretty much the only thing which would be lost is individual addressing of MRVs for named return values, which is easy enough to replace by naming the return struct and going through it.