What led me to believe this is Pike's article about the design goals of Go. I don't know enough about Go to know how well it succeeds, but I know what the intent was.
But you are falsely implying that the intent "be good for big projects" is opposed to the concept of "having useful abstractions". It is not. Go fails at being useful for big projects precisely because it fails to have basic useful abstractions. Those are most important in large projects. In a 1000 line program it doesn't matter much if I am repeating code, there's just not that much code anyways. In a 1000000 line project, it is a serious maintenance problem.