There are numerous successful "serious" projects written in Go!
The world of programming languages has improved since then.
The tooling is also annoying with the most glaring deficiency being the lack of package versioning, which I believe is going to change (or it has already? I don't remember). And then there are tools like `go vet` which basically just attempt to make up for the compiler deficiencies in sub-par ways...
Go has a very nice runtime, but the language itself and the tooling feels extremely half-baked. I'm curious whether Go 2 will improve upon this.