I agree. Same with Go. When I started with Go, I quickly forgave it all little rough edges in the language itself because they were offset by a tooling that was just miles ahead the state if the art of the time.
They have improved go modules since but if you didn't use github gos tooling wasn't so great. I actually dropped Go for Ada and prefer Adas packaging.
The package management story before go.mod was sad but I have to plat devil's advocate and point out that GitHub did have special treatment by go get, you could use any domain name to host your code and you just had serve a <meta name="go-import"> tag in a html file and you could tell go where to fetch your code (several version control tools including Mercurial are supported)