It was stated from the angle of wanting to ship software sometime this century.

But there is probably some truth in what you say as well. Footguns are no doubt refreshing after being engrossed in Typescript (and C#) for decades. At some point you start to notice that your tests end up covering all the same cases as your advanced types, and you begin question why you are putting in so much work repeating yourself, which ultimately sees you want to look for better.

Which, I suppose, is why industry itself keeps ending up taking that to the extreme, cycling between static and dynamic typing over and over again.

Overly expressive type systems have way more potential for footguns than simple type systems. In fact, I would say that overly expressive type systems make it easy to create unmaintainable code (still waiting on this showstopping bug which nobody can debug because it uses overly expressive types in TS: https://github.com/openapi-ts/openapi-typescript/issues/1769)

What realistic contender doesn't have all the same general features as Go? It doesn't exactly have many to choose from, none of them particularly esoteric, and most of them bare necessities required of any language.

Let's be real: You can absolutely write "Go-style" code in just about any language that might have been considered for this. But you wouldn't want to, as a more advanced type system enables entirely different idioms, and it is in bad faith to other developers (including future you) to stray too far from those idioms. If ignoring idioms doesn't sound like a bad idea on day one, you'll feel the hurt and regret soon enough...

Go was chosen because the idioms are generally in alignment with their needs and those idioms are wholly dependent on the shape of its type system.