The Go designers clearly had full awareness of every language feature available in alternatives. They consciously and intentionally made the choices they did. This is obvious, of course, but often it is stated as if they came out of a cave, language in hand, unaware of all the great things they were missing.

And to your last sentence, use in production is not a good measure of language quality

It is actually a great indicator of the gap between abstract language tourism, and practical day to day development.

I will say again that Haskell is held as the perfect language and set of choices on here constantly (particularly when used to denigrate Go). Yet it is used for perilously few actual solutions (despite being around for decades).

Sometimes the things that seem incredibly important and of great value just aren't such a great value in the real world. Similarly, things that seem minor end up being very important.