As someone who has paid attention to this since Go was released, there never was a honeymoon. The complaints in this thread have been the same exact complaints people have been lodging against Go since 1.0 was released.
What you're seeing is very simple to explain. Some people love Go. Some people like Go. Some people dislike Go. And some people hate Go.
Certainly from the very beginning, there'll be some subset of the relatively few people who've actually tried a new language who don't like it for some reason or another, or object on legitimate technical grounds (the border between these two types of objections is murky).
As the popularity of the language grows articles are written, starting in the specialized press and (if the language is lucky) ending up even in the popular press, getting even non-technical managers excited and using the newest buzzwords.
With time, the recognition and consciousness of the language's deficiencies become more widespread among a wider portion of the programming population, and articles and discussions of such complaints become more widespread.
In the end, such complaints may become mere truisms, and the majority of the population just parrot the truisms and stereotypes while having only a superficial or even non-existent familiarity with the language that's criticized.
Of course, you could say that such things were going on all along, but it would be missing the broad ebb and flow of language popularity and people's reactions to them.
Of course Bjarne would say that. The reality is, there are some languages that people use a lot and don't complain about nearly as much. Some languages are just actually worse to use. http://andrewvos.com/2011/02/21/amount-of-profanity-in-git-c...
Perl suffered a similar fate. When it came out unix was just surging in popularity with the internet boom and a lot of people were thrilled to have a single language you could learn which combined the features of common command-line tools like sed and awk, and that was a "real programming language" that was more powerful than shell scripting, and which grew to have a ton of useful libraries in the form of CPAN. Years later, and Python and Ruby started getting popular, the "Perl sucks!" mantra sprang up and the once-mighty Perl shrank before the upstarts.
Ruby and Python are getting their turn now, and I'm starting to see some people expressing hate towards them as well, though it hasn't quite reached the pervasiveness of Java and Perl hate yet.
Go was next. People were excited about this cool new language from Google, a place filled with great engineers, and from the mind of Rob Pike, of Unix and Plan 9 fame. It was supposed to be like a simpler and more elegant form of C. What's not to like. Well, the replies to this post are showing that for some the honeymoon is already over.
Other languages had their day in the limelight, only to wind up being hated: C++, Lisp, Fortran, Cobol, HTML, Javascript.
Bjarne Stroustrup observed that "there are two types of languages, the ones everyone complains about, and the ones nobody uses."
Whenever some shiny new language comes out, promising to solve everyone's problems in some domain, and people start jumping on the bandwagon and singing its praises to high heaven (which seems to happen ever couple of years), I try to take a deep breath and step back. There will likely come a day, before too long, when they too will be subject to hatred and scorn, just as all the other popular languages before them.