I agree that go and rust have different areas, but that was less clear when they were getting started. Back then go was trying to figure out what it meant by 'systems programming language' and rust had a similar threading model.

Another point is that they do share similarities, which might we might now just describe as being 'modern': They're generally procedual -- you organize your code into modules (not classes) with structs and functions, they generally like static linking, type inference for greater ergonomics, the compiler includes the build system and a packager manager, there's a good formatter.

The above are points for both rust and go compared to C/C++, Python, Java, etc.

So why do I like go? I think mostly it's that it makes some strong engineering trade-offs, trying to get 80% for 20% of the price. That manifests itself in a number of ways.

It's not the fastest language, but neither is it slow.

I really dislike exceptions because there's no documentation for how a function can fail. For this reason I prefer go style errors, which are an improvement on the C error story. Yes it has warts, but it's 80% good enough.

It's a simple language with batteries included. You can generally follow the direction set and be happy. It leads itself to simple, getting-things-done kind of code, rather than being over-abstracted. Being simple also makes for great compile times.