Right, but they mentioned sending immutable structs which is why I gave the struct example. But you're right that every declared map is a just a pointer.
With respect to your second point, I see what you mean but I still don't think that's a negative of Go. You can pass in copied values without having to have a deep_copy() primitive (loop map values and copy to new map, dereferencing a pointer, etc.). Like other parts of Go, if you want to make your data immutable there is no syntactic sugar. You have to explicitly write it out.