As an outsider who has only tinkered with Go and watched most of Rob Pike's talks, my impression is "C is to Go as Java is to JavaScript" in the sense that both have a thin veneer of a familiar language on top of a fundamentally different, esoteric language. For JavaScript it's Self (prototype inheritance) and for Go it's NewSqueak (CSP).

I don't think Go is really about catering to hordes of cheap junior devs or rebelling against Lisp or Unix, etc. It's (in my interpretation) a way to use channels and goroutines without overwhelming people with academic syntax. As a tool, "the right job" is small and focused on throughput and concurrency - not wiring up webs of generic abstractions. Obviously some people are also finding the language general enough to do the latter, but not without a bit of frustration.

If my understanding is reasonable, people shouldn't be asking "why doesn't Go have generics," but rather "should I be using Go for this? Does this program even have one 'chan' in it?"