I think a big factor in Go adoption was exactly this. If you wanted a language that could be used for system-y programming (i.e. something that AOT compiles to

I think a big factor in Go adoption was exactly this. If you wanted a language that could be used for system-y programming (i.e. something that AOT compiles to a native binary) then Go was the only game in town (before Rust came onto the scene) aside from C/C++. And the tooling for C/C++ development is pretty atrocious. I hadn't done any C++ dev in a long time until relatively recently and was pretty shocked to see how bad it was. It's amazing that there is still no reliable way to manage dependencies and the various C++ package managers out there (vcpkg, conan, etc) are still extremely finicky.