Should every library author vendor their dependencies separately too?
"Should every library author vendor their dependencies separately too?"
Whatever it takes to produce your end-artifact should be under the control of the relevant organization. Again, let me emphasize, this has nothing to do with Go, and you violate it at your sole and singular peril. When the $PACKAGE site goes down due to DOS, security penetration, or sheer time-based neglect, being angry at me won't help you any.
So, all you're really automating is me going to look at the package's homepage and seeing if there's a new version. I'd still have to read the changelist to see if the bug that concerns me is fixed, what other changes are included, and run all my tests (and possibly write new ones). This is automating the easiest part of upgrading a dependency.
If your build process downloads anything from the Internet, your build environment can change on you. Networks can always fail. At best you can detect this occurring and have your build process scream and die, but it can't be fixed.
Note the complete lack of the word "Go" in the previous paragraph. If other languages provide package managers that make it easy to download code from the Internet during your build process, they are tempting you to do wrong things. You should be in personal possession of everything you need to do a full build, whatever that may be (source or otherwise). And, again, note the complete lack of the word "Go" in that sentence.
This has nothing to do with Go. If you are depending on package managers to download your code from external sites during a build, stop reading this right now and GO FIX THAT. Seriously. Someday it will bite you, hard.
And may Turing & Knuth help you if you're downloading packages with unpinned versions that can just upgrade to whatever they want, whenever they want.
Now I will actually use "Go" in a sentence. The fact that Go expects you to vendor your source I do not consider a problem with the language. The fact that it fails to ship with a blessed tool for doing so is a potentially legitimate criticism, but the fact that it fails to ship with a tool that begs you to do the easy, wrong thing is a feature, not a bug. I wouldn't be surprised that they eventually bless something out of the community. Godep seems to be the current leader. Personally I can't recommend or anti-recommend any of them, I've just been vendoring by hand since I'm only using a handful of libraries, and the cost/benefit hasn't worked out in favor of learning something to save me mere minutes of effort. I know where to find solutions if that ratio ever changes.