I kind of agree with you (being an 'average Joe'?), but surely Go offers some advantages over C even for a C programmer; faster to write and compile, more readable code, concurrency, memory safety.
The only things that Go has over Modula-2 are interfaces, single declaration modules and GC.
Single declaration modules and GC were part of Modula-2 successor, Oberon in 1986, while Active Oberon in 2001 added Tasks and Interfaces to the Oberon language family.
All of these languages were used to built operating systems used for real work at Zurich's Technical University.