Go tooling was relatively very good a decade ago but other languages have improved a lot since then, significantly because of its influence, and it's now about average. It's still better than python, and C or C++ of course. But about even with typescript, ruby, shit even php and ocaml have nearly caught up with their tooling. Go's is significantly worse than rust god help us and elixir has always made good excellent here.
I wouldn't call its tooling "a mess" but these days it's nothing notable either.
Go was explicitly designed for fast compile times, especially compared to C++, and I haven't heard anything to suggest that's no longer the case. It was also designed as a more modern and mature replacement for C, and I can't think of many application domains where C is still the better choice.
Python is at such a different point in the design space I don't think you can really compare the two. Same with PHP, Ruby, Javascript etc.
For OCaml, need to decide how strongly you want to commit yourself to functional programming. Also, didn't OCaml have weak support for concurrency? Has that changed recently?
Similarly with Rust, comes down how much you want to commit yourself to learning and conforming to the borrow checker.
Elixir is an interesting comparison, as it's another language that allows you to build highly concurrent back end services. The tradeoffs are that Elixir provides even more robust scaling due to the Erlang VM. But Go allows you to more easily understand and optimize the memory and CPU performance of your application.
Well regardless of the goals or intent of its creators, it has found success as a general purpose language suited to a broad set of unrelated tasks. And in fact that is exactly how it is being recommended here by the articles author: so within this context I don't think it makes sense to exclude these other languages.
But even aside from that we were just talking about tooling at the moment.
My understanding is there are more fundamental reasons for why Go compiles faster, like how it handles "includes". And not supporting the C++ templating system.
And some things that slow down compiles are not to improve optimization. But to support complex, higher level language features. Go seems to hit a sweet spot of being highly expressive without slow compile times.
I consider that a win too tbh; JS land has improved a lot with e.g. Prettier and now Biome, and those were inspired by Go's formatter and stance saying "shut the fuck up about code formatting already, this is how it's formatted, end of story, go worry about more important things".
I wouldn't call its tooling "a mess" but these days it's nothing notable either.