I agree. For me RAII is almost like a Litmus test. I can comfortably write away in C# for a while but there's always a point in time where I want RAII something and realize that it's something extremely useful you give up when transitioning to a GC language.

The author did mention that GC has been around for C and C++ for ages yet people don't seem to use it. If manual memory allocation was such a big problem for C++ programmers people would have adopted a GC library long ago.

Which is not to say Go might not gain traction for other reasons but it's not really clear to me what problem it solves, even after reading the otherwise very entertaining and informative article.