I agree that the thrashing is a nuisance, but the 'reinvention' has nothing to do with Google except that Go didn't ship with a package manager by default becau

I agree that the thrashing is a nuisance, but the 'reinvention' has nothing to do with Google except that Go didn't ship with a package manager by default because it wasn't useful to Google for the monorepo reason you cited. Regarding "features forced down our throats", I think that has only happened with aliases, and the community pushed back to the effect that the feature addition was halted until the community had time to properly review it. Mostly I think that was a one-off problem. As for "it's a solved problem", is it? Until perhaps the last year, pip, npm, and most other package managers have been plagued with serious issues. I'm not fond of the situation in Go, but I think it's not unreasonable to try something different and less binding than a package manager until a solution emerges which solves the problems faced by other package managers.