I mostly agree with you, but ironically the article's own conclusion answers this: the language's general ethos is designed for correctness-oriented programming

I mostly agree with you, but ironically the article's own conclusion answers this: the language's general ethos is designed for correctness-oriented programming in the large, and this gives rise to lots of other features that garbage-collected languages could adopt but mostly don't. Like, it's way harder to avoid runtime panics in Go. (Swift does okay but people don't have faith that its custodians will do an adequate job of prioritizing the needs of developers using it for anything other than client-side apps on Apple platforms, and also it's slightly too low-level in that it doesn't have a tracing garbage collector either.)