I think it may be an uncomfortable truth for many language enthusiasts that with a decent compiler/runtime and a reasonably skilled team, you can write very good software reasonably efficiently in even a mediocre language.
Language design absolutely matters in terms of what can be expressed efficiently, what classes of mistakes are hard to make, what performance you can expect in normal code, but rough memory safety, some static typing, and basic abstraction gives you a lot of the value there, and you can close a lot of the remaining gap in language capability with some discipline and process.
Naturally, ideally we'd still only use perfect languages, and not allow errors that could be avoided or suboptimal code, but not all PL power is free and personal taste/experience isn't irrelevant, so I'm not too surprised that some people prefer a tool that to me seems worse, because empirically it often works out quite well.
Of course, this only makes sense if you already accept the premise that Go is bad.