> Of course the social landscape depends on people actually using it.

That's nonsense. Brainfuck has shaped the social landscape despite effectively nobody using it, and absolutely nobody using it for any real work. The social landscape is not at all dependent on use.

> And given the history of Go and the notoriety of its core team for flatly ignoring prior work in programming languages

Huh? Go comes straight out of prior work. It is nearly indistinguishable from Alef. What the Go language flatly ignored was being innovative. Reasonably so, of course. It wasn't trying to innovate in programming languages so that we'd have another to throw on the heap of languages nobody uses. It was trying to solve a specific business problem using well-established methods.