I agree, and I think this mistake is at the root of most of what are (at least to my biased point of view) the big mistakes made by go.
Syntactical niceties and simplicity / obviousness are sometimes a tradeoff, but go 1.0 felt like the designers just folded their arms and refused to consider any niceness.
I still don't understand why anyone would use go when there are so many better choices, but at least they're fixing some stuff now :)