Yes, thanks to compile on save on IDEs.

Also Turbo Pascal, Modula-2, Delphi, VB 6 were already doing that in 1990's hardware.

Here Turbo Pascal 5.5 marketing material from 1989, 34 000 lines per minute.

https://archive.org/details/TurboPascal55

Go compile times are a reason to admire only for those that never used such compiler toolchains.

I think people are comparing Go’s compile times to the compile times of other languages that they have the option of using in the present day. Go is not the only language in history for which there exists a fast compiler, but its fast compile times are certainly salient when comparing it with a number of popular alternatives. OCaml springs to mind as a plausible alternative to Go that also has a fast compiler, but its ecosystem is vastly smaller.