Yeah, insisting on things like a variable being used will result in people using work arounds. It won't result in people not doing it.

Then, because people trust the language to police this rule, the work-arounds and debug code will get committed.

func main() {  
    test := true  
}  

Oops, golang doesn't like that.

func main() {  
    test := true  
    _ = test  
}

Perfectly cromulent code.

If they really wanted to avoid people having unused variables, they should have used a naming convention. Any variable not prefixed by "_" or "_debug_" or whatever has to be used, for example. Then block any code being checked in that still contains those markers.