>worse program readability is not a true con. Any codebase can have positive or negative code quality, generics do not make this worse.

While true that generics are not necessarily going to make programs harder to read, it's also not very interesting to talk about theory.

The question which is answerable is, "on average, were go programs easier to read before the introduction of generics". The interesting point is what actually happens, not what could.

You are correct that we must observe this in practice. But, the original poster of this thread purports that generics are making go worse in multiple ways. 1: Slower compile times (without evidence) and 2: have created worse code (without evidence)

Sure, they haven't proven their claim. This is all the realm of speculation.