Golang is not an especially impressive programming language --- as a language. But it seems to me like it is an undeniably impressive programming tool.
Since when was compile time an interesting aspect to judge a programming language? More in the "nice to have" category, especially if your program is not 1 million lines and/or your language's compiler doesn't provide some modularity in this regard.
"I don't think most teams outside of Google and some C++ or Scala shops have had any issue with "long compile times" for that to have been a major factor."
Put another way, much of the problem is "modern compiler optimization takes a long time". Go's solution was "remove the modern optimizer". That doesn't actually solve my problem.
Since compilers were dog slow.
When using irb or lisp or smalltalk, my productivity is off the charts compared with C++, in no small part to the compile time.
Go's primary goal is: excellent tooling.