I've been using Go heavily over the last five years, starting with 1.2. Whatever warts the language has in its design, the error handling being one, it's still an excellent language for getting work done quickly, and correctly. I'm far more productive in it than Java, C++, or Python, and I'm old enough to have done lots of Pascal, Lisp, and more scripting dialects than I can count.
Having been writing software over the 30 years that you mention, it's clear to me that Go has not been isolated from language design, it's just made a choice to stay simple. Java, C++ and Python have exceptions to keep you from littering your code with error handling, and code with exceptions is hard to read. The line of code you are looking at any point in time may instantly jump to another place, effectively, having "goto"'s evil cousin, the "comefrom". Somewhere, in your code, is a "comefrom" statement which runs immediately after the statement you are looking at, you're not aware of its existence. My Java/Python for production code ends up looking a lot like Go in terms of error handling, because you have the most context about an error at the point where it happens, so that is the best place to deal with it. I believe that Go 1.x will have the staying power of C.
Having been writing software over the 30 years that you mention, it's clear to me that Go has not been isolated from language design, it's just made a choice to stay simple. Java, C++ and Python have exceptions to keep you from littering your code with error handling, and code with exceptions is hard to read. The line of code you are looking at any point in time may instantly jump to another place, effectively, having "goto"'s evil cousin, the "comefrom". Somewhere, in your code, is a "comefrom" statement which runs immediately after the statement you are looking at, you're not aware of its existence. My Java/Python for production code ends up looking a lot like Go in terms of error handling, because you have the most context about an error at the point where it happens, so that is the best place to deal with it. I believe that Go 1.x will have the staying power of C.