Go is a language made by Googlers, so its design helps with Google problems. And many of Google's problems are ones of scale.
* Go is straightforward to read. Any reasonably-competent college graduate should have little trouble understanding it and be able to become productive quickly.
* Go compiles into completely static binaries. You don't have issues like "oops, the build system runs CentOS 7 but we're deploying it to Ubuntu 18.04 and their libc's aren't compatible." With containers, you can copy many Go programs into `FROM scratch` images and they will work fine, greatly reducing the attack surface area.
I used to dislike for Go for similar reasons to you and others, but after using it for a few years at $employer, I've come to appreciate its merits. Sure, it can be a bit annoying to write
if err != nil {
return err
}