I should probably write a blog post about this, because it's a combination of a number of things. Primarily, the compiler is incredibly strict and opinionated, so it's impossible to make certain small errors like assigning to lvalues that are never used, importing packages that are never used, etc.

Secondarily, gofmt makes code very standardized and easy to skim. It takes Python's 'only one (obvious) way to do it' one or two steps further, by forcing everyone to to write their code the same way. This makes refactoring a lot easier because you don't need to read as much code each time in order to understand what's going on (or at least, you can mentally parse it much faster).

Finally, the context-free grammar combined with a strong, static type system means that migrating code from an old (incompatible) version of Go to the most recent one can be done painlessly with the 'go fix' tool. This isn't your py2to3 tool - this accepts valid (old) Go code as input and reliably produces valid (up-to-date) Go code as the output.

That last bit isn't actually used in refactoring manually, but I make note of it because very few languages give you anything close to this level of reliability with code modification, which speaks volumes about the design of the language's grammar.