The article has been updated to avoid calling the bytes "not useful" and to address the narrow, specific points I raised, but it is still generally suspect.
Over on Lobsters, zeebo took the time (thanks!) to build the same version of CockroachDB with various historical Go toolchains, varying only the toolchain, and found that if anything the Go executables are getting smaller over time, in some cases significantly so.
v1.0 v20.2.0
1.8 58,099,688 n/a
1.9 57,897,616 314,191,032
1.10 57,722,520 313,669,616
1.11 48,961,712 233,170,304
1.12 52,440,168 236,192,600
1.13 50,844,048 214,373,144
1.14 50,527,320 212,699,656
1.15 47,910,360 201,391,416
The title of the article ("My Go executable files are still getting larger") appears to be literally untrue, at least read as a critique of Go itself. If they are getting larger, it's because new code is being added, not because the Go runtime or compiler is degrading in some way over time.