Interesting, I came to the opposite conclusions, but for the same reasons. I like that they waited to see what alternative proposals/implementations were out there before they decided on their own.

Especially since "Go team cannot empathise with use cases outside of one bespoke enterprise" — it shows self-awareness of their shorcomings. I think it's wise to let the target audience explore the design space themselves a bit first. Considerably lowers the risk of cementing the wrong design.

I do somewhat remember the drama around this at the time, but I my impression was that of a petulent community of various dependency management projects with too much ego attached to them to see the bigger, long-term picture.