But it's not as if they threw a massive amount of manpower or budget at it. I think Go succeeded more by association (to Google) and the fact that it hits a sweet spot for many people - it produces native code, but does not have the complexity of C++ or the unsafety of C.

I have written a fair bit of Go code. But I will switch to Rust without a second though once the ecosystem takes of. The lack of simple things like generics or algebraic data types in Go is jarring.