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I’ve written some things in both languages and compiling go feels an order of magnitude faster.

It's mostly because most setups will use maven or gradle which do much more than just compile code. They will often pull down dependencies, check for bugs and style inconsistencies, run unit tests etc. If you run plain javac against a bunch of files it will compile just as fast as Go. In any case it will be in a blink of an eye.

It's rare that I notice the compile time for either. Incremental compilers are great!

Yes, it’s much faster than these java and jvm based codebases (including all jvm based languages like kotlin, scala etc). Go as a language is just so much simpler.

Although compiling overhead of large JavaScript codebases, that make up most of modern websites, kills any kind of benefit in improving build performance of some backend service.

The article mentions why choosing Go over Kotlin is memory consumption.