Next potential step: allow-unused: false which will report ineffective nolint statements. This is equivalent to reportUnusedDisableDirectives: true in eslint and I very much recommend it.

Missed one:

modules/graceful/manager_windows.go:44:	//lint:ignore SA1019 We use IsAnInteractiveSession because IsWindowsService has a different permissions profile
modules/graceful/manager_windows.go-45-	isAnInteractiveSession, err := svc.IsAnInteractiveSession() //nolint:staticcheck

I'd suggest merging the comment above into the nolint comment. I don't think this //lint:ignore does anything, it's the only such comment in the codebase.

Interesting that the allow-unused: false change did not catch any issues. Can you verify it works correctly by putting a unused nolint anywhere?

it does work:

modules/optional/serialization_test.go:185:49: directive `//nolint:revive // test` is unused for linter "revive" (nolintlint)
			err := yaml.Unmarshal([]byte(tc.data), &obj) //nolint:revive // test

it won't trigger for disabled linters (or so I suspect, I'm not sure if that's accurate), so things like //nolint:gosec (which was removed in this PR) won't show up unfortunately.

it won't trigger for disabled linters

Might be a golangci-lint bug, thought I'm not 100% what the correct behaviour should be.

Sometimes the linter is right and we need to fix the bugs instead of continuing using "nolint"

For example: var methodCtxKey struct{} is a bug.

I made some changes:

1. update some nolint comments
2. remove some deadcode
3. rewrite some code to make it readable then no need to use nolint, e.g.: error/log handling
4. fix some bugs like methodCtxKey
5. leave some FIXMEs if the nolint looks suspicious

Each change is independent so hopefully it wont' be too difficult to review. 🙏