Thank you for that link, it was really fascinating. The Australian government guarantees deposits in the same way, but I never realised this was also true in the US. I had assumed during the mortgage crisis that people lost their deposited money when their banks failed.
At my company we would love to use buf but can't: because of the BSR. We already pay shitloads for our VCS - we don't want to pay for another product that does the same thing. After using go and getting a taste of what life is like without third party package publishers (like npm, pypi, etc) it's hard to want to go back.
I can't agree with having a source file include the tag. It is an eternal source of merge conflicts and pain, unless you take steps to automate it. And in that case, does the file add much value anymore?
My personal experience with go modules and versioning has been really positive. In that ecosystem - you only define your major version in the mod file and rely on the VCS for everything else.