I think the value of simplicity is often underestimated, especially by really smart people.

Go's bare-bones practical, opinionated simplicity can eliminate, right from the start, huge numbers of decision points developers might face any given day while using more complex and expressive languages, with plethoras of elegant abstractions to fit every situation. Thats really valuable IMHO, when any one of those decision points can lead to technical debt, or lost time and energy on internal (and external) technical debates.

Its an especially huge win when building software to perform necessarily complex work (like distributed container orchestration).