Panic Recovery in Go - Tutorial 

Glad it was helpful!

I actually agree... perhaps one point (as a new Go developer) that isn't clear to me is what's the purpose of even calling panic() if you're just going to recover() anyway? I mean (by way of example) if instead of calling panic(), why not just print an error message, discard malformed data (e.g., whatever) and continue the application?

Exactly this. So if someone calls a function when this middleware is enabled then this recovery handler will effectively stop any panics from bringing down your app instance.