to op: glad you're taking time to check out golang. I too have worked mainly as PHP dev since 1999 or so, and recognize most of what you are saying. I loved the new era of php with the composer ecosystem, but after investing too many hours into Laravel, i finally had enough when I realized I could not even use the backtraces to debug some issue I was having after upgrading. So I decided to never touch it again.

Coming from php to golang is insane, you will be very impressed by all the mature and insanely fast tooling.

For example I now have test suite running in about 0.3 seconds, where my last PHP (laravel) app took about 20 minutes testing similar stuff.