That's certainly my understanding of the situation. Matt Farina has a great commented history of dep and vgo [0] if you haven't already seen it. The comments are particularly enlightening.
Still, it's not clear to me what made the Go team get into the package management game at all. As you say, for years they were happy to leave that as a community problem. But something spurred them to declare that Dep was an "official experiment."
> Dep is okay when it works, but inherits pretty much all the warts of Glide, which Boyer also worked on.
Funny, I've had exactly the opposite experience. Glide caused us plenty of trouble at CockroachDB, but Dep has worked flawlessly, if slowly. I've also found Sam to be exceptionally friendly and responsive to feedback [1] [2].
[0]: https://codeengineered.com/blog/2018/golang-godep-to-vgo/#co...
