[ruraljuror]

The actual behavior of go seems much closer to your ideal scenario than what you attribute to it. Although it is more nuanced, so both are true. In go, a module is a collection of packages. When you go get a module, the entire module is pulled onto the host, but when you vendor only the packages you use (and i believe only the symbols used from that package, but am not certain) are vendored to your module as dependencies.