Perhaps it's because what makes a codebase messy is having written code in it over time.
In the beginning, those Node.JS codebases were clean and manageable. Then came bug fixes, changing requirements and refactors. 2 years worth of that led to something that was quickly becoming unmanageable.
But then came Go and, after a rewrite, everything was clean again! It doesn't matter than the code base is only 3 months old, I'm sure it's going to stay this clean forever!
But hey, should those Go codebases become messy a couple of years from now, I'm sure Rust will have matured into a worthy successor and, after a rewrite, we'll all have the cleanest codebases ever!
It's what devs are saying about any tech that's becoming popular.
It's much more useful to read a competent critique of Go (of which there are a couple) than post after post saying how everything is great. Everything can't be great, it's a basic fact of software engineering!
I've been coding since forevs, and I really do feel like Go pushes you to keep clean code. Maybe the language, but a lot of it's just culture and leading by example.
Every time I peak into the source of a standard Go package, I'm blown away by how clean and simple the code is -- and it's a fantastic way to gain a deeper understanding of the language.
That has mostly not been my experience diving into std C library code, or quasi-standard stuff like boost...
I like the aesthetics of JavaScript. It makes the code cleaner because it doesn't require so much boiler plate. There - I said it :-)
Oh and compared to Go, I always point to sorting in Go. Just look up the library. I think it's awfully complicated, compared to JavaScript where you simply pass a comparator function. In Go you need a lot of lines to achieve the same thing.
Yes, every language/framework is good at something and bad at some other. They are just tools. What matters is what one builds. A lot of technical news these days are about tools, not products.
So a master woodcarver works with chisels, his "tools", for his entire life...30 years, and with them he turns bare wood into incredible works that the world recognizes as valuable art.
Someone hands him a chainsaw, which by all measurable metrics should allow him to do the work 10x faster because, of course, it is more powerful, modern, and designed by "superior minds" whom understand IC engines, gearing, etc etc.
I think what I want for Christmas is a language with C syntax and keywords, no header files, no GC, ships with a library that has everything (threads, http, websockts, crypto). This new language takes all the bad parts of C and throws them away and does not care about backwards capability. Call this new language C++ or whatever.
For what it's worth, I moved to node.js late and even then only reluctantly. I only used it for one project, and found it to be a somewhat difficult experience, like I was fighting the language all the time. (It was still a step up from PHP which I'd been clinging to.)
I didn't realize how much I disliked JS playing "loose and fast" until I used Go with its rigidity.
I didn't. I tried node.js for a couple of months and it was like a breath of fresh air. But later on drowned on constant promises and never called back ;)
