That's an annoying lie, and makes codebases in languages with genuinely strong static type systems (e.g. Haskell) much harder to read than necessary.
Hell C#'s type system is stronger than Go's, yet there is no such prevalence of meaningless variable names (first one comes in at #23, Go has 7 single-letter variable names in the top 23)
For example,
int getAge(Person p);
int getAge(Person person) ;
Haskell does type inference, so even if types are static they are not explicit. That's why you still need explicit variable names.
Except neither exposes that pattern (they essentially have only one such variable in their top list, and it's "i"). And I already mentioned C# which is very similar to Java.
> is redundant.
I'm not saying single-letter variables (or no variable at all which is also possible in Haskell) is universally bad, I'm saying it is disturbing to find how absolutely ubiquitous it is in Go. Variable names are sometimes redundant, that is not a universal constant. That redundancy is a factor of the expressiveness of the type system, that's hardly a claim of fame of Go.
> Haskell does type inference, so even if types are static they are not explicit.
Go has local type inference, and leveraging Haskell's global type inference is usually recommended against.
> That's why you still need explicit variable names.
No, it is not.
Also in Java if you use intellij then you'll probably get 'person' as an autocomplete, which actually makes it roughly as easy to type out as 'p', (and a better choice if your entire team has standardized on intellij.)