I don’t think this is a bad thing. Most developers think of themselves as more advanced than they are and end up making a mess trying to do abstraction beyond b

I don’t think this is a bad thing. Most developers think of themselves as more advanced than they are and end up making a mess trying to do abstraction beyond both their ability to do it well and beyond what the problem requires. And even the truly advanced developers very often prefer simpler tooling because it allows them to concentrate their resources on the complexities of the problem and not those of the tool. Further, the idea that Go is somehow bad for motivated engineers doesn’t match my experience and it doesn’t explain the proliferation of interesting tools and services (much of the container / devops ecosystem). I think your mistake is assuming that the only kind of motivation/creativity/etc involves tinkering with language runtimes and that someone who is building original things like Docker, Terraform, or Kubernetes must be “unmotivated”.