[matthewaveryusa]

Nope, this analysis is wrong. Decompile your code and look at what's going on: https://godbolt.org/z/f1nx9ffYK

The thing being returned is a slice (a fat pointer) that has pointer, length, capacity. In the code linked you'll see the fat pointer being returned from the function as values. in C you'd get just AX (the pointer, without length and cap)

    command-line-arguments_readLogsFromPartition_pc122:
            MOVQ    BX, AX     // slice.ptr   -> AX (first result register)
            MOVQ    SI, BX     // slice.len   -> BX (second)
            MOVQ    DX, CX     // slice.cap   -> CX (third)

The gargabe collection is happening in the FUNCDATA/PCDATA annotations, but I don't really know how that works.