That's a good point. I suppose "usefulness" in today's world reflects the kind of problems being solved today. eg Java had CORBA support for years, just because

That's a good point. I suppose "usefulness" in today's world reflects the kind of problems being solved today. eg Java had CORBA support for years, just because in the late 90s, distributed objects were going to be a thing. XML/WS support is still there, but it took a while to get JSON/REST, etc. If you want to remove stdlib packages, I guess you would need Go to ship a tool that automatically rewrites sources to point those package imports to a standard "golang/x" location (or something) that provides the same package. Or alternatively, some kind of indirection via the go.mod file.