It was an important lesson in a way, as it taught me that Google – or indeed, any organisation comprised of thousands of people – is not a single monolithic entity.
Also, feel free to drop me a line if you've got problems with a specific error, and I can perhaps point you in the right direction.
It was just that the error message I got really gave me nothing useful to search for. Literally was a "permission denied" error... while "go build"ing stuff with effective superuser. It wasn't really pointing me at what it didn't have permission to do or how I would go about getting it.
I think Debian ships with Go 1.11 in current stable (and by extension, Ubuntu too, I assume?). The entire GOPATH to modules switch is messy, ugly, broke a lot of stuff, and is confusing for newcomers, even though modules is clearly better. I think we're finally nearing the end of it though.
You probably want to just use Go 1.14 (the latest version) if you can. The language itself is very stable (just not the surrounding tooling).
And yeah, I believe Go 1.15 should be released in August. rc1 was released last week or so.
(Myself, I am usually just trying to build stuff people wrote in Go, and I usually end up fighting the tooling for a while and getting mystified by the error messages and having no idea where to look to solve them.)