In certain ways Go is more bare bones, but Go also comes with common hashes, some crypto primitives, encodings like JSON, compression/archives, logging, date/time utilities, Regex, a templating engine, an http client and server, regex, .... All of which requires a dependency with Rust.
I do remember an effort of a meta package like you mentioned. I think it was driven by brson and on Github, but I can't find it now, and it was abandoned anyway.
* As with "syscall", users are strongly suggested to use "golang.org/x/crypto" for crypto primitives like AEAD. All of the crypto bits in the standard library are probably still "okay" but there are better interfaces and more efficient implementations in "golang.org/x/crypto".
* The "flags" package is basically useless for large projects (everyone uses "cobra" or "spf13/cli" to create CLI interfaces now). It also has the really weird Go-ism of "-flag" arguments.
* For logging, most people use "logrus" or similar. "log" isn't necessarily bad, but it's not full-featured enough that most people end up not using it.
* As for HTTP servers, at the very least you'll use "gorilla" to deal with routes -- if not completely switch to a different HTTP server implementation.
* Not to mention some of the other weird bits and bobs which are useful, but are strange to include in such a small stdlib, like "mime". Or some of the more fruity stuff like "database".
This is the downside of the batteries-included model. Especially when a lot of the bits in the Go stdlib were included early in the language's life and then quickly became a clearly bad idea but it was too late to remove them.
But some parts of the ecosystem end up in a lot of projects. Conservatively extending std would be good for the language, IMO. To set a standard, reduce compile times, and ease the burden for companies that have hard review requirements for each dependency.
Some things I'd like to see in std in a few years:
* `serde`
* `rand`
* `log`, but probably without a backend, or a simple default
* a subset of `chrono`
* some parts of `rayon`
Both failed to gain any traction.
Go has the exact same problem, and has also historically made similar mistakes to Rust in their stdlib (the "syscall" module is strongly recommended against -- instead you should use "golang.org/x/sys"). And it should be noted that Go is even more bare-bones than Rust -- the lack of generics means you have to use "containers" which is very limited (I also have a feeling it's used by effectively nobody, because of the bad ergonomics).
I think the best solution for this problem might be some form of "meta-crate" concept which would allow you to pull in all of the well-vetted and stable libraries that most people want, without having to curate ~20 libraries yourself.