It's also easier on the learning curve. I've just gotten back into coding as a hobby after a two-decade-long gap. In that time every few years I've tried to pick up C, and always ended up bewildered and frustrated by garbage collection matters. Maybe with formal instruction I could have figured it out, but the learning curve as a weekend/evening hobbyist was like a vertical cliff.

But in one month with Go, I've gone from "barely remembers his teenage QBasic days and dabbles in VBA at work" to "writing genuinely useful utilities with minimal time investment". I'm sure the language has limitations, but I've yet to run into any that are personal showstoppers.

If there's one single reason why Java killed C++ in the enterprise space, it's memory safety. (Concurrency-readiness and WORA were also important features of course.) GC was not important, other than as a means to an end of course.

What GC does in practice is open up new domains. There are object-management patterns that simply can't be written feasibly without something like a GC runtime under the hood. (Hence Greenspun's tenth rule of programming, of course.)