no it was added at the request of the athens project (github.com/gomods/athens) so there would be a canonical way to download modules that we could use to prime the cache.
I opened the original issue in question due to lack of feature parity and it got quickly closed (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/26610#event-1753880630). Then after some twitter back-and-forth (https://twitter.com/sgnn7/status/1022547467466956802) the issue got reopened.