It's just that they've been convinced that generics are justified. And they have concrete proposed solutions under evaluation.
[1] https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/go2-language-...
I wonder if anybody’s actually changed their mind on this, or whether the opinion of the Go team has shifted simply because it’s made up of different people now.
From this blog post[1] from last year from the core Go team:
We’ve been thinking about generics since work on Go began, and we wrote and rejected our first concrete design in 2010. We wrote and rejected three more designs by the end of 2013. Four abandoned experiments, but not failed experiments, We learned from them, like we learned from check and try. Each time, we learned that the path to Go 2 is not in that exact direction, and we noticed other directions that might be interesting to explore. But by 2013 we had decided that we needed to focus on other concerns, so we put the entire topic aside for a few years.
Last year we started exploring and experimenting again, and we presented a new design, based on the idea of a contract, at Gophercon last summer. We’ve continued to experiment and simplify, and we’ve been working with programming language theory experts to understand the design better.
Overall, I am hopeful that we’re headed in a good direction
"Generics may well be added at some point. We don't feel an urgency for them [...] we continue to think about it. [...] The topic remains open."
These sentences have been in the FAQ since Go 1.0. Maybe people should start to believe them.
They have gathered experience with the current language, their generics design drafts have improved over the years, and now they feel like they have something that might fit.