Yes about the language but also Google understands that both tooling and standard library is more important than the language. All of that makes Google internal maintenance much much better. Another artifact of google3 was the absolute shitshow of GOPATH and abysmal dependency management – because Google didn’t really need it, while people outside suffered. When they added go mod support Go became 10x more productive outside of Google.

Go is almost an anti-language in that sense, reluctantly accepting shiny lang features only after they’ve been proven to address major pain points. It’s almost more an “infrastructure deployment toolkit” than a language. Which strangely makes it extremely pleasurable to work with, at least for network-centric applications.