Indeed, because semantically there is a syntactically implicit scope for every let binding. For example, in that case, the outer a is dropped after the inner a, just as if the second a had been inside of a block. There may be multiple syntactic ways to introduce a new scope.
[0] and go is actually weirder than that — and the opposite way 'round — as `var` doesn't allow any shadowing in the same scope:
while `:=` allows same-scope shadowing as long as the overlap is not complete: both allow arbitrary shadowing in sub-scopes.