There appears to be a confusion (at least to me) on what the appropriate receiver type ought to be by default.
Looking at; https://tour.golang.org/methods/8
That tutorial encourages new go users that:
There are two reasons to use a pointer receiver.
The first is so that the method can modify the value that its receiver points to.
The second is to avoid copying the value on each method call.

this seems to imply that you should default to using pointer receivers in only those two cases.
whereas looking at; https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/CodeReviewComments#receiver-type and a few other credible go sources eg; https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/788743046280077313
we see that actually, pointer receivers should be the default while value receivers are the exception.

So to summarize; the tour.golang notes makes it appear as if pointer receivers are the exception(that was my impression when I went through those notes as a new go user some months back) whereas in actual sense they are (or ought to be) the default.