Depends you who "they" is. If you mean the go development team, then yes, they said they wanted to "take their time and do them right"¹. But there are many "gophers" who did say that there was no need for generics, and that it shouldn't be added to the language.

¹ I would argue that it is really, really hard to add generics to a language after it has already matured, and still "do it right" than to add it in the beginning. At least if you care about backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility adds a lot of constraints to your generics system that will almost certainly lead to a sub-optimal design. And you will be stuck with a standard library, and a lot of existing ecosystem code that would benefit from generics, but don't because generics didn't exist when they were written. This is a lesson I wish go had learned from Java's generics.