The fact we disable the rule in our own code makes me think on the pertinence of checking calls to flag.Parse outside the main function.

That's because the right way to do is to use either this

func main() {

	// (...)
	flag.BoolVar(&setExitStatus, "set_exit_status", false, exitStatusUsage)
	flag.IntVar(&maxOpenFiles, "max_open_files", 0, maxOpenFilesUsage)
	flag.Parse()

	// (...)
}

or this

func main() {
	err := run()
	// (...)
}

func run() error {
	fl := flag.NewFlagSet(os.Args[0], flag.ContinueOnError)
	fl.BoolVar(&setExitStatus, "set_exit_status", false, exitStatusUsage)
	fl.IntVar(&maxOpenFiles, "max_open_files", 0, maxOpenFilesUsage)
	err := fl.Parse(os.Args[1:])
	if err != nil {
		return err
	}
	// (...)

	return nil
}

You can take a look at the code I wrote for gh-reaction

But maybe, the error message for flag.Parse should be way clearer, about the fact there is a need to use flag.ContinueOnError

Please note also, that the same code, using flag.NewFlagSet(os.Args[0], flag.ExitOnError) or flag.NewFlagSet(os.Args[0], flag.PanicOnError) should be reported as deep-exit, but it would be a next move, and somehow a niche maybe

EDIT: it's not a niche :P https://github.com/search?q=language%3Ago%20%2Fflag%5C.NewFlagSet.*flag%5C.(Exit%7CPanic)OnError%2F%20-is%3Afork%20-is%3Aarchived&type=code