>Generics is the single biggest language feature absent in Go. It’s often missed by newcomers to Go. But it’s more of a type-system mechanism. It’s unclear if it’s an essential language feature.

Oh, it's clear by now. Though "essential" is a weasel word -- in a way nothing is essential in the sense you can do it all with assembler too.

>Generics are incredibly complex in both semantics and implementation. There are considerable trade-offs to consider, such as do you want a larger binary vs. slower binary vs. larger source code.

Unless I use them, I get none of those downsides. And when I need them, I now have to implement support for my types manually, which results in larger source code anyway.

And "larger source code" hasn't been a problem since 1980.

>Language features without competition: goroutines, interfaces, defer (now in Swift)

Those have been around in several other languages... Hardly "without competition".

>Tools without competition: fast compiler

It's fast because it's not doing much. And there are several compilers that are fast too.