And slowly, the language is expanding in very obvious conclusions.
Personally, I think there needs to be a balance in a language, where it should not be too restrictive in its syntax, but on the other hand, it should not be overly complex and has too much syntax. I am on the fence with Swift, but it does seem to come on the complex side.
Don't get me wrong, Go's simplicity comes with considerable tradeoffs and I'm not sure I'd use it in most cases again (started a greenfield codebase with it 3 years ago which is now around 200kloc).
Just pointing out that syntactic edge cases can make writing easy, but most of programming (beyond one-off scripts) isn't writing. See: Scala and C++. Companies using these languages in production frequently disallow entire subsets of syntax or language features because they're hard to maintain.
As I said in another comment, there seems to be a battle between extremes. On one end, the "complex" C++, Scala and others. On the other, simplistic stuff, such as JavaScript, Go, etc. It's probably gross injustice to put Go and JS in the same category, so I apologize, but for this argument, let's over look it. I think Swift and Rust are a good middle ground here.
With your large project, in hindsight would you prefer Go or C++? At least with C++, you can go as complex as you want, or stop and set some "rules" that should not be passed. But I err on the side of having the option rather than being restricted.
I think I lean the same way as you: the option for complexity, and counting on static analysis/linters/discipline to bound that complexity.
That said, for all its theoretical flaws, Go is certainly a productive language (and has grown a pretty handy ecosystem over the years). In the end, the project was deemed a success and choice of language probably played a minimal role compared to hiring good people and prioritizing the right features.
https://dave.cheney.net/2017/06/15/simplicity-debt https://dave.cheney.net/2017/06/18/simplicity-debt-redux
And slowly, the language is expanding in very obvious conclusions.
Personally, I think there needs to be a balance in a language, where it should not be too restrictive in its syntax, but on the other hand, it should not be overly complex and has too much syntax. I am on the fence with Swift, but it does seem to come on the complex side.