I use go a lot and also love it. I did find it odd in the early days to not have a package manager, but they seem to have mostly built on the experience of NPM and got it right.
Yeah, the initial days were indeed odd, and modules absolutely required, otherwise the ecosystem would probably be a tangle of different 3rd party solutions for vendoring and version-pinning right now. Glad they avoided that.
They were building in the right direction with the idea that a world where public code repositories exist, a) doesn't need yet-another-repository for just one language, and b) should acknowledge the real world by specifying these resources directly in the code.
