Right. My view is: Go brings back a lot of the great traits of languages like Pascal and Modula. Fast compilation speed, a simple static typed language, a modules concept. Adding a few nice things like GC, high order functions and some more.

I feel, programming too often lost productivity with quite a few modern languages. Go brings that back and adds a good amount of modern features, but doesn't get too much distracted by them.

How does it bring back productivity when it has the expressivity of C (at least before generics, it’s a bit better afterwards)

C doesn’t have methods, interfaces, closures, newtypes, packages, map or safe slice and string types, or safe automatic allocations.

What bad faith nonsense.

And before generics it could not even implement maps in the language itself, hence my comment.

I do not think this is true. Async programming via channels in Go is a big win and way more expressive than what any C library can give you. Also, higher order functions and interfaces are good. On top of that they added generics. I think that it is more than enough of a practical language already.

True but they didn't have to deal with the complexity of the modern software where a typical project can pull in thousands of dependencies (transitively).

That is taken care by using binary libraries, see Delphi or Eiffel.