Don't mean to advocate, I've had the opposite experience. I love listening to the guys over at the Go Time podcast, but for simple things I reach for Node (that I desperately want to escape!), and for a better language I reach for Rust, it just feels right, although I completely agree about library code being complex to understand and using a lot of magic to squeeze out every last drop of performance.
As a corollary, I still haven't been able to understand Go modules and the way code is supposed to be laid out! In fact, a Go 1.16 broke one of my npm packages as it deprecated `go get` with no real alternative for my use case, without manually creating a go.mod file for the cloned repository (that I don't own) in question. I guess this creates a natural... distate for said language.
I think if I would have started with Go, I would have loved it from day 1, but now it provides too much friction to get stuff done. Yeah, it's fast (but most new languages are), it fools C programmers into thinking it's like C due to its syntax, but people coming from the functional world which they believe to be the holy grail will run away in fear with the number of mutations (no Array.map or iterators) and pointers flying around. I still haven't managed to get SQLite working with Go on Windows (stop! a lot of developers do use Windows!), the Rust crate just worked.
The only language that I've actually had fun trying out recently is Elixir, which completely surprised me. The AoC challenges were fun to write in it, and honestly still quite fast!
Similar experience, but different outcome:
I used Node (with Typescript) as well for small and simple stuff. Typescript is probably still my favorite language.
Now, I'm using Go for about 2 years and to my shame I haven't really understood Go modules properly. I still need to look up simple stuff in the standard lib regularly. I can relate that Go is quite different than what many from us coming from other languages are used to. To me, Rust syntax felt much simpler to learn.
However, Go is now my standard tool. Rust takes just too much brain power just for memory management. The Go std lib is a huge time and headache saver. Go gets overall so much right that I learned to live with some of it's quirks.
Sometimes I wonder what a world with strong ESM support, a slim runtime such as just [1], strong typing (like Rescript is trying to do), a unified format/lint toolchain and a solid standard library would like like, look how far Node.js has gotten despite its numerous flaws.