To me that criticism you quoted seems really misguided. A person who doesn't want to see performance measures from new users will never understand how they (the new users) are typically using the language and where the most common performance blocks are at the newbie stage.
It's important to understand how new users are using the language, but new users of the language should not be focusing on performance before they learn the language well enough to know what is idiomatic and what is not, which was the original criticism.
The criticism is well-grounded: it's rather tiring to see endless "performance benchmarks" that test little more than printing to the console[0], or create artificial programs that are direct line-for-line translations of another language, and don't represent what an actual developer would generally write.
Think of it as a from of premature optimization - literally.
[0] Not in Go, but I can't count the number of times I've seen people use these comparisons for languages like Python and Ruby. It's incredibly ironic, because these languages really just farm out to the same underlying C libraries for this functionality, so it's testing something, but not really the performance of the actual language features.
It's important to understand how new users are using the language, but new users of the language should not be focusing on performance before they learn the language well enough to know what is idiomatic and what is not, ...
See, that's a chicken-and-egg problem. This was my original point. How do you come to understand how new users are using your language and where they're taking performance hits if you keep telling them not to try to write performant code?
First you teach them how to write idiomatic code (non-performant), and then you teach them how to make the idiomatic code more performant.
It's very common for new users (in any language, not just Go) to try to jump right to the end, but focusing on performance before understanding basic language building blocks is a recipe for frustration, both for the new users and for the language designers.
