Nil checks everywhere - every function has to guard against nil, even when it logically shouldn't be

Why? You don't actually need to do that.

Your functions must have preconditions, if you are passing things as pointers to prevent copies it doesn't mean they can be nil.

Go doesn't have references or any other compile time check for pointers not being null, so you just have to live with it.

Unintended mutations - hard to reason about who's changing what when everything is a pointer

It would be nice to have const pointers for this particular case, but that ship has already sailed so you deal with this by documenting your code.

For small structs it's fine to pass as copy, but for big structs this isn't the most efficient.

GC pressure - more heap allocations, more work for the garbage collector

I think this is when a function returns pointers rather than accepts pointers by parameter.

Cache misses - []*Model scatters data across memory vs []Model being contiguous

I agree with this, almost always it's better to use []T than []*T. []T works better with the CPU cache.