FWIW, this criticism no longer applies to people using AOT compilation. From my macOS laptop:

     /usr/bin/time -l ./hello-world
    Hello World!
        0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
             3231744  maximum resident set size
                   0  average shared memory size
                   0  average unshared data size
                   0  average unshared stack size
                 841  page reclaims
                   1  page faults
                   0  swaps
                   0  block input operations
                   0  block output operations
                   0  messages sent
                   0  messages received
                   0  signals received
                   2  voluntary context switches
                   4  involuntary context switches
            22395110  instructions retired
            18507246  cycles elapsed
             1294336  peak memory footprint

So "peak memory footprint" for hello world is 1.2 MB and it starts instantly.

Now, not everyone can/will use AOT compilation. It's slow to compile and peak performance is lower unless you set up PGO, plus it may need a bit of work in cases where apps assume the ability to do things like generate code on the fly. But Go can't do runtime code generation easily at all, and if you are OK with those constraints, you get C-like results.