> Apparently they wrote their own rather than using something established like LLVM, and this is the result.
Go is self-hosted, and compilation is much faster than any LLVM-based compiler I know. Those are valuable properties. We can argue about how valuable, but it's not nearly as simple as a case of NIH as you're implying.
Looks like the Go code generator and optimizer is absolutely terrible, since any reasonable optimizer has standard optimizations that prevent this.
Apparently they wrote their own rather than using something established like LLVM, and this is the result.