Go is just making a certain set of tradeoffs. If you try to fix all the "mistakes developers have been doing for decades", you get Rust. And considering that Rust is already Rust, there is not much point in trying to make Go another Rust.

The line has to be drawn somewhere. I think everyone has certain things they'd put on the other side of that line, and strict nils are probably at the top of the list for many, but overall it's good that the Go team is stubborn about not adding new stuff. If they weren't, maybe there would be better nil handling, better error handling, etc. but compiles would also get slower and the potential for over-engineering, which Go now discourages quite effectively, would increase. At a high level, keeping Go a simple, pragmatic language with a fast compiler is more important than any particular language feature.