Well now gold is stagnating https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNU-Gold.... I think if google had waited a few years gold would have just been lld, and this all would have been avoided.
It took a ground-up rewrite to make it so. Rui Ueyama was employed by Google while he wrote LLD for ELF--it was his primary assignment, bought and paid for by Google.
So Google didn't just wait. It moved on to the next step.
I'm a huge fan of LLD by the way. But in addition to performance and its implementation architecture, I think licensing had something to do with LLD's success.
> The semantics of LLD’s archive handling are different from the traditional Unix’s. You can observe it if you carefully craft archive files to exploit it. However, in reality, we don’t know any program that cannot link with our algorithm so far, so it’s not going to cause trouble.
[1] https://llvm.org/devmtg/2012-04-12/Slides/Michael_Spencer.pd...