I did a quick search and turned up nothing about stripping the pclntab (note: distinct from the DWARF line-number tables which can be stripped). A post on Google Groups suggests the opposite - pclntab cannot be stripped because the runtime needs the info for GC - https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/golang-nuts/hEdGYn....
You're right, but that wouldn't make the main problem go away though. I just built a simple plugin for Kubernetes's kubectl and it's about 32MB with go build's -ldflags -s -w where 16MB of that is still the pclntab mentioned in the article.
The problem with removing that completely is that you won't get any information on panics. I don't think this is what you really want, and the current behaviour strikes me as a reasonable middle ground.
32M is really large for a simple plugin, and to be honest I think that says just as much about Kubernetes as it says about Go.
No you cannot strip away pclntab, it is necessary to implement the (mandatory, often used) runtime.Callers API.