Yes this was a regrettable decision which causes lots of unnecessary pain and confusion and I wish they’d reverse it.
You can just use tags, no need to copy files, but IMO it should not be the package management system’s job to enforce draconian rules about semantic versions and import paths. Otherwise go mod seems pretty straightforward and sensible to me though.
This was just to support backwards compat with GOPATH for the brief time that the ecosystem was transitioning to modules. Now that GOPATH is rarely used, it’s not necessary.
I was talking about the requirement for v2/v3 in paths on major version as a regrettable decision, not the particular choice of duplicating dirs (which they recommended initially and as I pointed out can be sidestepped with a tag).
You can just use tags, no need to copy files, but IMO it should not be the package management system’s job to enforce draconian rules about semantic versions and import paths. Otherwise go mod seems pretty straightforward and sensible to me though.