New languages usually improve upon older languages by making certain errors impossible by design. For example, Go allows pointers, but not pointer arithmetic. With C we learned pointer arithmetic is often harmful (though sometimes necessary), so Java removed pointers from the language (not completely, though). Go takes a sensible middle way, because no pointers sometimes is ugly. Such a clean slate is good, because with older languages programmers fight their language deficiencies with habits (e.g. if (5 == x) instead of if (x == 5) to prevent if (x = 5)).

On the other hand, we will find the pitfalls and dark corners of Go over time, but currently we do not know them enough. Go will acquire its own conventions, but we do not know all of them yet. This is the risk of a clean slate.

That's bullshit, Go is not a "clean slate", and a number of design issues of Go are known and have been known from the first release regardless of its designer's refusal to acknowledge them. We know pervasive nullable types are a source of errors, we know shared-memory concurrency is an error-prone default, we know a lack of generics makes userland code painful and generics are hard to retrofit in an established language (and even Go's designers know it, why do you think they build special-case generic collections in the interpreter?), we know allowing implicitly ignoring errors is a bad idea and making it easier to ignore than handle errors also is. These are not recent issues, they're well known and there are a number of possible strategies for handling them.

And Go's worst sin, to me: we know that foisting complexity and repetitiveness upon the user leads to forgetting, and forgetting leads to mistakes. And that's exactly Go's approach to errors, resources management and shared structures mutability. Human error is something you can very reliably bet on, human infallibility... not so much.

Personally, I consider gofmt the biggest achievement of Go, if it manages to make that mainstream. While there are equivalent tools for C they are not widely used.

Decade which ended 20-odd years ago relative to the rest of the world, kind-of the point.

Yeah, really actual.