This release adds special handling for imports of the deprecated github.com/golang/protobuf/proto package.
github.com/golang/protobufhas deprecated the proto package, but their protoc-gen-go still imports the package and uses one of its constants, "to enforce a weak dependency on a sufficiently new version of the legacy package".
Staticcheck would flag the import of this deprecated package in all code generated by protoc-gen-go. Instead of forcing the project to change their project structure, we choose to ignore such imports in code generated by protoc-gen-go. The import still gets flagged in code not generated by protoc-gen-go.
You can find more information about this in the upstream issue.