Perhaps we're talking past each other - I'm certainly not saying Go should be Haskell (I've never even written a Haskell program!). Go's designers are clearly not stupid, and many people seem quite satisfied with their design choices. But that doesn't mean they "had full awareness of every language feature available in the alternatives", and even if they did, smart people are still susceptible to the blub paradox.

As for use in production, I agree that it can be a fair barometer for "utility", but I strongly disagree that it's a good measure of "quality" (as in, technical design choices). We live in a path-dependent world rife with network effects, so quality per se just doesn't matter all that much, and non-technical factors like "being backed by a major corporation" can matter a lot. I'm sure there's more Visual Basic in the wild than Go, but I'd hardly use that to argue that it's a superior language, or that Go proponents are "abstract language tourists".