When Go was launched, it was said it was built specifically for building network services. More often than not that means using protobuf, and as such protobuf generated code ends up being a significant part of your application. You'd have that problem in any language, theoretically, due to the design of protobuf's ecosystem.

Difference is that other languages are built for things other than network services, so protobuf is much less likely to be a necessary dependency for their codebases.

I'd say auto generation is just another instance of Greenspun's tenth rule.

What I've found over the years is that protobuf is actually not that widespread, and, given that, if you ignore gogoprotobuf package, it would generate terrible (for Go's GC) structs with pointers for every field, it's not been terribly popular in Go community either, despite both originating at Google