I suspect that the kind of scaling Go was intended for was programming scale. A lot of the design of the language seems specific for large scale projects (statically compiling everything, not having unused variables, explicitly naming all imports, fast compiler, test and benchmarking as builtins, code changing via go fix).

These are problems I have seen with larger java projects with unused imports, unused variables, library dependencies, long compile times, etc. I think that Go's niche is for extremely large projects, but it remains to be seen if it will work.