I could be wrong, but it seems like it wouldn't be difficult to outperform these implementations with a similarly hacky C implementation. I expect that blog post in the coming days.
Hey, author here. You are absolutely right - Go would have a hard time outperforming finely tuned C. Rather, the article was more focused on exploring concurrency mechanisms in Go. The (admittedly clickbait) title was more of a reference to the articles before it than anything else.
That said, I think you'll find this SIMD-enhanced wc interesting: https://github.com/expr-fi/fastlwc/