I think it's philosophically interesting. The Go approach to needing a more powerful language is to assume that you actually want to write a custom code generator for your project's needs. And it's not pretty to do so(the "go generate" thing makes quite a wart in its attempt to ease this process), but it works, and you can move on with your project. Most newer languages get tied in knots trying to generalize that same task and have a kind of configurability meltdown where everyone does it differently, so while it can be shared and reused in theory, none of it is actually compatible. I think it's akin to criticism of OOP in that in a lot of cases, "you wanted a banana but you got a banana plantation, three tractors, and twenty employees".

And Go is just a little bit closer to the sweet spot than C was, since a greater proportion of Go code seems to successfully avoid extensive preprocessing.

On the other hand, it might be a bit too restrictive for prototyping to have these power limits. I definitely have an easier time feeling my way through an unknown data modelling problem if I can start slinging things together dynamically.

That is an interesting point, and even if that is true, it still means adding generics would be a detriment.

I do wonder if that's an inherent property of languages with a more expressive type system. Many would blame it on OOP, but I think Haskell also suffers from it. Haskell that is written without using typeclasses is much more readable than Haskell that's written more plainly, at least to me.

It might be a unique property to Go, which other language is strongly typed yet with such a basic typesystem, lacking inheritance or even generics?

I will echo this too. I think Go has helped usher in the sensible concept BDD and of microservices to the forefront and the do one thing do it well approach. Versus monolithic applications instead you have a lot of digestible standalone services comprising the overall application and Go excels in this.