Google created it for
novice programmers, mostly fresh out of college, that they wanted to be able to fire easily. This is a stated reason from the early discussion about design rationale, and is alluded to in the OP. There's also a number of features (especially in older versions) that seem to only make sense when using it in a monorepo like Google does (which also stores built binaries in version control), such as the way imports work and the way `go generate` works.
It blows my mind when people ignore these and make post hoc justifications about why its design is "good, actually" for projects outside of Google. They released the language to the public in order to condition the labor force and make onboarding easier.