I don’t think Go was ever especially over-hyped, and it has been pretty wildly successful in its “niche” (server side programming, CLI tools, daemons, etc). There was some controversy because someone said it was for “systems programming” by which the author seems to have meant “distributed/networked systems” rather than “operating systems” or whatever most people mean when they use the (very imprecise) term “systems programming”.
And to that extent, Go has been very successful (virtually the entire container ecosystem and a good chunk of the broader cloud ecosystem). It is doing a lot of stuff that would have previously been in Java or C# or Python or Node or Ruby (contrary to your “hardly anyone is actually using anything else…” remark).
Of course, older languages are naturally going to have more jobs because there’s an enormous volume of legacy code that can’t be cheaply translated to a new language, but so you have to look at the distribution of languages among new projects to be able to even begin making reasonable comparisons between languages, and even then a historically Java shop is probably going to give a ton of preference to Java, so here too we see a lot of weight given to older languages irrespective of their merit.
Of course, this is nonsense and people use containers because they deliver real value, not because of Google marketing or name recognition (most don’t even know containers come from Google, but would likely attribute them to Docker). I’m not a container purist—eventually micro VMs and unikernels will eat a lot of their market share (that’s my prediction, anyway), but until we get there containers are invaluable and criticism like yours is devoid of substance.
And to that extent, Go has been very successful (virtually the entire container ecosystem and a good chunk of the broader cloud ecosystem). It is doing a lot of stuff that would have previously been in Java or C# or Python or Node or Ruby (contrary to your “hardly anyone is actually using anything else…” remark).
Of course, older languages are naturally going to have more jobs because there’s an enormous volume of legacy code that can’t be cheaply translated to a new language, but so you have to look at the distribution of languages among new projects to be able to even begin making reasonable comparisons between languages, and even then a historically Java shop is probably going to give a ton of preference to Java, so here too we see a lot of weight given to older languages irrespective of their merit.