> I’m not sure exactly which qualities/features of Go make it so much easier to read,

In my experience, golang is harder to read. It's overly verbose that it's hard to figure out the underlying logic. What can be written as

    items.filter(|n| n.price >= 10)
         .groupBy(|n| n.source)
         .mapValues(|v| v.sum()/v.length())

would be over a dozen lines of code in golang, with potentially one off functions everywhere. This only gets more obnoxious with larger code bases.

The problem is that even if golang added generics, they won't be composable. In their proposal, they proposed adding map/filter/etc functions in a separate package, not as functions on slices as a proper language would do. The same mistake they did with not having any functions on strings, but kept them in a separate package.

Also, they need to improve their anonymous function syntax.

    foo("param1", func(a int, b string) bool { return len(b) < a }

is verbose, more advanced languages simply shorten it to

    foo("param1", |a, b| b.length() < a)

or something equivalent