If you change a header you need to recompile all files that include it, even if the include was conditional. Now your build system starts to look inside files rather than just check timestamps. Similar tool bloat happens over and over again in large codebases.

I'm not convinced Go has the right solution. But it's disingenuous to claim that it's competing with the C preprocessor. It's leagues better.

You should enumerate all the information in the paper you consider to be misleading.