Well of course you don't need to. Individual/independent developers would use what they deem fit. It is corporate developers who will receive mandate to use a particular language or technology. For example a large company where I work, it is mostly Java shop. However the new telemetry/tooling group has now mandated to use Go. So about 40+ devs are working in Go. Nobody asked their opinion about Go vs Java or Generics , Sum types, exception vs errors and so on. Same devs would have used Weblogic/Websphere or whatever if asked.

Developers in this categories are not going to say "LOL J2EE" or "LOL Go". They will do whatever being asked and collect paycheck in return. If they chose to be independent voice, they are going to be asked to leave and make way for devs who comply.

Java had the Object superclass, and that's how generic methods and classes were written before version 5.

Is there a Go equivalent of Object?

Yes. The empty interface.