Well, then, good news, this is mostly an effect of Kubernetes being its own ecosystem. It's implemented in Go but it is not generally considered a good example of a Go project. First of all, there's a great blog post somewhere about not looking to the largest projects in any language in general, because they tend to become their own ecosystems, but I don't know where it is. It's right, though. Secondly, Kubernetes is an extra-specially-bad example of a Go project because it's actually a Java project that was ported into Go, and even today the architecture makes that very clear that's how it evolved.

The Go ecosystem in general is actually pretty good about backwards compatibility. If you're starting out new, you shouldn't even necessarily notice this "go get" change because for you the new way will just be how it works, and the new way is easier to understand for a new person than the older, more confused way is. Plus, you have to opt-in by upgrading your Go compiler, and that's really quite optional; if you choose to stick to one for a while, you don't miss out on many libraries, because the language hasn't changed much. It isn't until generics drop that you'll start seeing libraries that you must upgrade for, and if you ignore the libraries that are literally "we're deliberately using generics to do things we can only do with generics" I expect it to be even another year or two minimum before you start seeing other more generally-useful libraries start to require them. I certainly don't intend to go back to all my libraries and retrofit them with generics just because. I don't think there's a lot of pressure to keep up with the latest compiler all the time.

HN has a lot of people waiting with bated breath for Go stories to drop who like to come in and complain vigorously about whatever the Go team has done, despite not using the language themselves. I don't mean to discount people with real experiences, but HN's sound and fury are not always proportional to the real problem. (Just because someone don't like Go's type system and the fact that it lacked generics for so long doesn't mean that piling on and moaning about some not-all-that-significant change in how the tooling one wouldn't be caught dead using and don't know much about is a useful thing to do.)