Pardon my ignorance but last time I checked Go deps where a mess: you list deps as github repos always pointing to latest master. The concept of version control did not exist. I have written some go and write a lot of js. I'd choose npm over that everyday.
> I assume server-side NodeJS code bases are the same their front end cousins in terms of deps pulled(?)
Most frontend code bases use actually very little dependencies, the big blob of (dev) dependencies are in the build pipeline: you need to transpile, compile, optimize, bundle, etc. the codebase. You only need those if you want to compile the frontend.
In order to run go code you need the compiler which is a binary of at least 100 megs. You can of course compile manually on your machine and push an executable, but you can do the same with a frontend (if your NODE_ENV is production npm will not download all compile deps).