I suspect that much of Go's popularity stems from one thing that's completely unrelated to its language design woes: its ability to generate standalone binaries with minimal dependencies (and specifically none on Linux, which is prevalent for container use).

Go itself is not particularly simple, actually. It's simplistic, meaning that you have to jump through more hoops to do common things. For a concise example, consider adding an item to a slice in Go vs adding an item to a collection in pretty much any other modern language.