* 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`
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.