Once they do, you know not every "generics or bust" will be satisfied and the anti-Go hate will simply shift.
I say let the haters hate and keep generics as their focal point.
Which is the grown up, honest, thing to do.
But I'm not sure about the other thing you mention:
"Maybe but maybe the "Go needs generics" folks will just go away."
Why would they go away?
They ask for Generics because they have found some use for Go (say, because it has a OK standard library, or decent tooling and momentum compared to alternatives), but also found a need this feature.
Neither the "use of Go" they found, nor their need for generics will disappear if the language devs say "no". If anything, as stakeholders in the languge (a user is a stakeholder) they'd be even more pressed to change the language dev's mind -- down to the fork point.
the go-lang team at google is very smart. It's not that they have a huge amount of high-priority work other than generics. Why don't they address a summary of the sentiment on hacker news on generics ?
If you're a language developer, your life is made harder if you have to add generics.
And if your language gets all the people that are easily satisfied with something "static and faster to write than C" why go the extra mile?
Especially if your goal is not building a commercially succesful language, or an advanced language, or a language to solve 2014's problems, but just to hack on what you have created.
Besides, being a great programmer and a great language designer are two different skills. Would a language created by Linus be that good?
No, I don't know that.
Do you suggest they are lying and just hate go out of pure irrational emotion? (Despite some of the critics having writen thousands of lines in Go, or some like pjmlp have even had code in the standard libs).
Is there evidence to suggest that?
Does that hold true for other languages too? When people criticize a specific problem a language/technology has (e.g. Python's GIL or PHP's lack of proper language implementation with AST et al, SOAP for its verbosity, etc), is that out of "haters gonna hate" mentality?
Does that extend to that programmers cannot recognize constant pain points in a language, and those that complain about such things are irrational?
I find the idea expressed in the comment incoherent and illogical itself.
I'd myself be very happy with a hint of generics in Go, though. Something at the package level, that would be instantiated at "import" time (since the import keyword is supposed to hold some magic in itself) would have my preference.