I'm in the camp that actually prefers -- strongly prefers -- Go's style of error handling over exceptions. It's not a perfect language of course, but when you say it's successful only because Google marketed it, I think you're off by quite a lot. Go is popular in part because of the things you hate that other people like. Also, Google hasn't really done any real "marketing" of Go that I can see. They released it with what amounted to enough fanfare to say "Hey, here's a thing. We think it's pretty cool. Here you go."

And the point of Go is that it isn't trying to be "fundamental steps ahead". If anything, Go is an opinionated statement that programming was better in 1992 than it is today, so let's just fix the annoying shit from 1992 and pretend the word "enterprise" had continued to just mean the ship from Star Trek.

I have similar gripes with Go. I really love programming with CSP techniques and Go does a good job of implementing a lot of this at a lower-level. Clojure also draws from CSP and from Go's implementation of CSP, but lacks some of the nice things Go has going on here at lower-levels, however I end preferring Clojure for so many other reasons. I still would not shy away from Go, but it's far from a perfect language and doesn't really improve on a lot of things that similar languages don't do well.

I think it's not just Google, but the cult of Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, etc. I appreciate their work on so many things, so I don't mean any ill-will. I was a user of ACME editor and Plan9, but just like those projects, Go has so many polish issues in critical areas. The package management alone is ridiculous. The common theme in all these projects is for every good idea, there is an order of magnitude more critical mistakes or divisive ideas that cripple the end result in some way.

Go is alright, but it's not really that interesting to me or a monumental leap. There are a few ideas that others could cherry-pick and put into much better designed languages to take it all a step further in my opinion.