That was the first thing that my school IT teacher drummed into us - don't use "goto".

I didn't learn this until college. And I resisted it for a while. But yeah, "goto" seems strange to me now, too.

I think the original Collosal Cave code was written in the '60s or '70s (I'm pretty sure I was playing it on a Honeywell mainframe and family member's teletype & dial-up modem by the late '70s), so ESR probably just brought the GOTOs forward from the original.