I'm pretty sure parsing robots.txt isn't the challenge. The Go team asserts that there are technical difficulties to this traffic optimization, and I don't have

I'm pretty sure parsing robots.txt isn't the challenge. The Go team asserts that there are technical difficulties to this traffic optimization, and I don't have any reason to disbelieve them (they're clearly not dumb people, and I certainly trust them more than Internet randoms when it comes to maintaining the Go module proxy). It's a bummer for Drew, but he isn't Google's top priority right now (it seems wild to me that you think there is "no excuse" for Google not to prioritize niche use cases like Drew's--how do you imagine large organizations choose what to work on?).