Why do so many companies keep moving to go? I tried to like it, but it was just so painful to write.

I'm curious, what is painful about it?

I came to Go from mainly C++, Java, and Python background, and I feel like it's the best of all 3 (to me). It's compiled and really fast (like C++), it has a great set of libraries and community interaction/support (like Java), and it has simple syntax that is clear and quick to understand (like Python).

It's not a perfect language (nothing can ever be), but it's become my favorite to use for back-end web services and even taken over some of my scripting workflow.

I can see it being painful if you're trying to render websites server-side though. That's a bit outside of what it's made for

Personally I found it too easy to accidentally forget to check an error, or to shadow a named error return, or to create a nil error that doesn't compare equal to nil. Also to write a method that appears to mutate the receiver but which in fact copies it.

Use https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck for that.

Or prefer https://staticcheck.io/ for a larger set of checks.