Is it possible that it's like every other language, with flaws and tradeoffs that don't always make sense to everyone? Why make it more complicated than that?

This might sound bad, but having worked in a few different languages, I find it kind of cute how some parts of Go seem to promote simplicity while others are simply what the authors were used to growing up. Sometimes it frustrates me when I write Go, when I see a tradeoff due to the latter. But yeah. Languages tend to have a lot of subjectivity of their author in them. The more "strict" the language is, the more confined you are to the author's opinions.