No, I don't think the whining did a thing. It may seem impressive on HN, but compared to the continuous stream of whining any successful project receives about all sorts of things I suspect it was weighing less heavily on their mind than HN would think, because it's proportionally much smaller than HN thinks. Also, it's not like Go isn't already fairly successful; if I wrote a language as successful as Go I wouldn't exactly be crying myself to sleep every night, you know?

Cruise through the Go issues and look at all the closed issues. Then, for context, cruise through Rust's or Python's, or your favorite open source project of some size that isn't even a programming language. It's a constant deluge.

What did it was real use cases from using the language for a long time, offered by serious people who weren't just berating the designers. If you read the generics design, and especially if you read the whole history of the design, you can see where this has had an impact, where the features are tuned for the use cases presented by the community, and how the design has changed at least twice in a major way (depending on how you count, of course) as people work through the use cases.

You'll also come to understand better why it's not like you can just flip a switch and "turn on generics" and why everyone running around claiming it was easy is dead wrong. You can also learn some of this by paying attention to discussions of generics in other languages when Go is not a topic, because it'll become clear when not discussing Go, there's a lot of broken generics and strange edge cases and poor decisions made by existing languages that we have to live with forever. Not that all of them are broken, but, again, the idea that some care needs to be taken wasn't something the Go team just made up. There's plenty of languages, even big name languages like Java, that "flipped the switch and turned on generics" and it turned out not to be as awesome as presented, because it's a legitimately hard problem even in 2021.