But those people at Google were veteran researchers who wanted to make a language that could scale for Google's use cases; these things are well documented.
replyFor example, Ken Thompson has said his job at Google was just to find things he could make better.
They also built a language that can be learned in a weekend (well, now two) and is small enough for a fresh grad hire to learn at the job.
replyGo has a very low barrier to entry, but also a relatively low ceiling. The proliferation of codegen tools for Go is a testament of its limited expressive power.
It doesn't mean that Go didn't hit a sweet spot. For certain tasks, it very much did.