It's elegant, because all code generally lives in a repo online somewhere, and by having a canonical place for that code to live on your local disk, it's trivia

It's elegant, because all code generally lives in a repo online somewhere, and by having a canonical place for that code to live on your local disk, it's trivial to have code that references other code that lives online somewhere else, and you can get all of it with a single command. If I go get your package, and your package uses someone else's package, I get their code too. It's quite elegant. And all it needs is one little environment variable that says "store my go code here".