Well these are just anecdotes but "five times the amount of code" is an outlandish claim. I've done direct ports of code written in more expressive languages (Python, Scala, others) to Go, and also created SDKs in multiple languages at the same time, and I've never seen anything close to 5x.

Go is certainly more verbose than the more expressive languages but the code is also usually much more robust and reliable in my experience, due to strong types, error handling, the well tested standard library.

On your example, the for loop verbosity is a bit annoying and I'm happy that go 1.23 got user defined iterators to help with this https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.23#iterators