This line of reasoning never made sense to me because there's plenty of stuff in the language that isn't absolutely needed, such as the various special syntax for certain concurrency constructs.
The whole “we don’t need generics” fiasco was hilarious, though.
I wonder if generics and proper dependency management were on this survey you’re talking about...
Generics and dep management were on the top of that survey last year. They are the primary focus of the Go team right now. Russ wrote Go Modules for dep managment, the implementation specifically addresses pain points from the community. Generics are a hot topic and looks like we're close to a finalized design.
Don't get me wrong the Go authors have overridden the community a couple of times and there was some serious outrage. Don't think that was a Google thing though, more of an "We know better" from the authors.