The ability to trivially cross-compile in Go, and get a single-file executable artifact, is often mentioned but still not appreciated enough. This is still a multi-hour project, minimum, for most languages, especially if you are introducing a second platform to a well-established project. In Go, it‘s a compiler flag.

I think between http, encoding/json, and the io libraries, it’s also very simple and straightforward to do most of the things a typical command-line program does, in a cleaner way than shell or Python (both have their place) and with less fuss than Rust or C++.

There's a relatively large difference in executable size, which might matter in some situations. And in run time. For executables that can get put to task doing a lot of heavy lifting and hammering on memory resources like grep and awk and others, it might make a real difference.