Except the critiques for not including generics were valid and the designers finally had to admit they should be in the language. "Less is more" really just meant "omit anything newer than we are used to."
You're implying a contradiction (and a weirdly adversarial one) where none exist. "Less is more" never implied "we will never change anything" or "we got it exactly right with v1". Yes, Go launched without generics so the developers could figure out whether they were really necessary and how best to add them.
I'm sure many will say "well I could have told them they were necessary from the start", but the overwhelming majority of these people are just lucky--they picked a conclusion that happened to pan out. And we know this with certainty because most of these people make arguments for generics where they are neither necessary nor useful--they're merely familiar with languages with generics and they reach for them on first sight of a problem. These people also can't articulate the advantages of not having generics--namely the unreasonable productivity that accompanies everyone writing the same code absent personal flourishes. The very fact that these people consider it a no-brainer that generics were the way to go from the start betrays their error--generics are only just worth their costs, and the emphatically pro-generics camp can only rarely articulate those costs due to their inexperience with other kinds of programming.
My stance is adversarial because Go has wasted an enormous amount of people's time. Not having generics was pitched as a feature, and they spent a lot of effort bragging about how fast compiles were without mentioning that this was because their optimizer was pitiful rather than some great property of the language design. They ignored just about every major development in programming language research in decades and rereleased something they'd already built before, just laundered under Google brand this time to ensure popularity.
The value of generics is obvious if you ever write your own container. Go had pre-Java-1.4 level type safety for any container not specially blessed by the creators. Prior art on how to do them without significant compile time cost was already established by Java, not even some obscure academic language. Go was dumb from the start.
You betrayed your own credibility. As previously mentioned, those who can't articulate the tradeoffs associated with the generics question lack qualifications--they are amateurs, and their opinions aren't interesting to professionals. Consequently, for lack of interest, I'll leave you to your opinions.
