OP makes some reasonable arguments about the practical uses of Golang, but anecdotally and seriously evaluating it for a complex backend service, I felt that I

OP makes some reasonable arguments about the practical uses of Golang, but anecdotally and seriously evaluating it for a complex backend service, I felt that I had to write a non-trivial amount of "simple" code that felt like a mix of copy & paste procedural code with some very shallow object oriented programming. I attempted to write the same service in Kotlin (http://kotlinlang.org http://kotlinlang.org), which felt mature and easy to understand. JetBrains did a great job also making it "boring." It felt like it was a boring attempt at making Java programming enjoyable. Along with 100% interoperable with Java libraries, alongside incredible tooling, made writing reasonably boring but functioning code very enjoyable. To each their own, but I'm having a hard time justifying why I'd use something like Go over something like Kotlin. Maybe I'm missing something?