I find the statements about the type system very credible. I've been programming go full time for nearly 3 years and not a single day goes by that I'm not bitten by it.

As far as whether go makes it easier or harder to make easy to manage code bases I don't know that it matters one way or another. I've written bad code in other languages and go. I will say, I've never seen a large go code base, and I suspect if I did it would suffer very much from things that people complain about with the go language.