[throwaway894345]

Yeah, I also think people index too hard on the language itself, when the runtime, tooling, and ecosystem are all much more important. Moreover, I think "mediocre" is a good thing so long as it means "fewer features" or "simple". I'm kind of glad Go is a mediocre language in this sense, because it gets out of the way. And Go's runtime is similarly "mediocre"--it's fast enough for 99% of applications, it doesn't use a ton of memory by default, the default GC is low latency, goroutines far easier to use than async/await, all it needs is a Linux kernel (no userland dependencies), and it's all small enough to fit in a static binary. Go also has a pretty good standard library too; no need to pull in dependencies just to marshal JSON or make HTTP requests, and everything compiles to static binaries by default so distributing CLI tools internally is a breeze.

Go isn't the best at anything, but it gets 80-90% of the way there on everything whereas other languages aim for 100% in one dimension (e.g., performance, static analysis) at the expense of all other considerations (e.g., usability).