They asked for a small surface area, Pascal and most of its descendants have a small surface area especially compared to their two "large languages" of C++ and Rust. If you look at built in operators and keywords Go certainly gets pretty big too:

  break        default      func         interface    select
  case         defer        go           map          struct
  chan         else         goto         package      switch
  const        fallthrough  if           range        type
  continue     for          import       return       var

  +    &     +=    &=     &&    ==    !=    (    )
  -    |     -=    |=     ||    <     <=    [    ]
  *    ^     *=    ^=     <-    >     >=    {    }
  /    <<    /=    <<=    ++    =     :=    ,    ;
  %    >>    %=    >>=    --    !     ...   .    :
       &^          &^=          ~

25 keywords, 48 operators.

Clearly more than 30 something. Since OP considers Go a small surface area language, I don't see how that list from Turbo Pascal would disqualify it.

> JavaScript is what comes to my mind.

If they suffer from analysis paralysis with Rust and C++, I don't see how JS would be much better with its millions of frameworks.

> Besides hardly getting more performant I'd keep my fingers off dead technology (like Forth!) unless you're really into the history thing, exotica or the sheer mind-boggling, which is also cool but sadly rarely productive.

They also never said they cared whether the technology was live or dead. What's it mean to be dead if it can still be run anyways?