Sometimes languages converge because of informal consensus that something is a good idea. Maybe Go adding generics is a good idea, even if it's a step in the direction of following trends.
Either way, most languages don't have syntax which is significantly challenging or easy (with exceptions like Rust), and it's the ecosystem which makes the language so productive. So whether or not Go added generics today or a decade ago, Go was still great anyway thanks to its standard library and ecosystem.
ie what matters is not the number of characters you have to type, but how easy the resulting code is to understand.
And here there are two factors - the verbosity and the conceptual load.
I think the mistake some language geeks forget is the importance of the conceptual load- the language surface area/complexity - and they tend to focus on brevity at the expense of conceptual complexity.
I've been primarily doing Javascript and the like for the past decade, and while I appreciate new features like functional operations added to the standard library - although that was a long process - and arrow functions, I lost it when they added object-oriented structuring like classes, but only half an implementation because there wasn't any good access modifiers. And they added OOP before they added modules and imports. I don't understand.
And I don’t mean it in a good sense.
Languages are about telling computers[1] what to do - at the right level of abstraction for the task in hand.
As far as I can see ( as an outsider ) is the trick in language design, is not the programmer ergonomics per se - but creating a set of abstractions ( expressed as language features ) that can then be converted into machine code in a way that's some best combination of reliable, safe and fast.
[1] Not directly, but indirectly via compilers or interpreters.
Had it not been for the success of Docker and Kubernetes adoption, and Go would have been as successful in the market as Plan 9, Inferno and Limbo.