Go used one of the oldest sales tricks since day one. You sell all your shortcomings as merits. My imagination for fun:

* We don't have templates. Hm. Let's bad mouth them. Let's say templates are too difficult. Agreed.

* We don't have exceptions. Hm. Let's bad mouth them as well. Agreed. That one is easy.

* We don't have much abstractions. Hm. Let's convince new college graduates that they can't handle abstractions anyway. Mwahaha. But waait! New college graduates are actually smarter than us. I know... But we will convince them that they are not. Mwahaha.

There is more but I think I've just earned enough down votes with that much already. :)

But there is one sales sentence I will never forget. Go people said "No major systems language has emerged in over a decade"[1] As a person who was very much into D at that time (and I still am), and as a person who knows how "major" D is, that sentence from the Go people make me see them as either ignorant of the programming language scene or deceitful. Cheap sales tactic at best...

Disclaimer: I used Go professionally for 1 year for a product in the microservices space in 2017-2018. The only thing Go had going for it was the libraries that were already written at least for that space. Whatever we needed was already written for us; we had to wait at most 2 weeks for something that we needed to pop up. There was nothing else in the language that made me want to write in Go.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20091114043443/http://golang.org...

It's impossible to measure how much impact just having Rob Pike and Google behind Go has had on its adoption.

Google and Pike get you in the door. Goroutines get you to sit down. The onboarding-oriented nature of the language and ecosystem convince you to sign.

What Go did for the tooling space cannot be underestimated, it is wonderful and we will never go back to the before time.

What providing a formatter like indent has provided for decades?

Selling a Turbo Pascal/Modula-2 like compilation speed from MS-DOS days as novelty?

Or was using IDE code refactoring tools as UNIX CLI?

You're saying "it's impossible to measure", but it sounds like you have an assumption about the answer...

Do you really care about that or is that just ye olde "the lemmings use Go" bit?

For a bunch of reasons, but one of the most important was it had Google's backing.

Google being involved is mixed blessing, but having financial support to see it prosper is not unreasonable to appreciate.