Talos Linux [1], "the Kubernetes Operating System", is written in Go. That means it exactly works as the little demo here, where the Kernel hands over to a statically compiled Go code as init script.

Talos is really an interesting linux distribution because it has no classical user space, i.e. there is no such thing as a $PATH including /bin, /usr/bin, etc. The shell is instead a network API, following the kubernetes configuration-as-code paradigm. The linux host (node) is supposed to run containerized applications. If you really want to, you can use a special container to get access to the actual user space from the node.

[1] https://www.talos.dev/ [2] https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/releases/tag/v1.11.5

The goal was to strip away most of the complexities (including C), to make the topic more approachable for a broader audience.

Go seemed a perfect fit, it is easy to pick up the syntax and see what is going on, but you can still be close to the OS.

Go can speak C. It's fine.

I mean what you run is still machine code anyway, right?