Personally I also think that if you removed memory safety overnight from Rust, people will still use it. Rust is appealing not because it's memory safe. For some uses it is, but most people flock to Rust because it offers an alternative to C++ without fifty years of accumulated cruft. Rust is a modern language, with a well working package manager/build tool and a wide ecosystem of libraries for every usecase. Memory safety and other features are just a cherry on the top. If Rust used garbage collection I am sure it would also be very popular just because of those other things.

Other languages like D or Nim tried to fit into that space also, but they don't have the budget to really make it. Most of work on those languages is done by unpaid volunteers, so there's little direction and there's a lot of one man projects.

One thing I've learned over the years is that if you go with the grain — not against it — of a language (or any system, really), the design tends to become apparent quicker. "When in Rome," and so forth. Cultural displeasure tends to disappear if you give the native way an earnest chance rather than resisting it. For example, in the beginning, marking identifiers as public by giving them a capital letter struck me as the ugliest thing ever. I don't mind it now. It's never going to be something I love looking at, but it does have the benefit of making declarations' visibility extremely obvious.

I don't think Go's popularity is due to Google at all. Google the company has never really promoted Go (unlike Microsoft with C# and Sun with Java, for example). Go is still treated as a bastard stepchild in many Google projects such as Protobuf/gRPC, Beam, and Google Cloud. The Go team has never seemed very enthusiastic about PR, either. There was that one big redesign of the Go site, but relatively little after that.

I think Go grew by word of mouth more than anything. Projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Traefik, etc. helped a lot. Don't forget that it took years for Go to become popular. It wasn't taken very seriously by many in the beginning. Go was not popular within Google until relatively recently. For many years the only serious thing written in Go internally at Google, as I understand it, was the dl.google.com backend.

  let x: usize = 42;

And complaining about "thing string" vs. "string thing" seems high on pedantry.

Yes, there are aspects of Go I really dislike, but I find fewer things to dislike in Go compared to things I dislike in all the other languages I have programmed in.