I recommend giving it a second chance. You will at least realize that the "thing string" problem isn't a problem, it's just something you find aesthetically displeasing.

One thing I've learned over the years is that if you go with the grain — not against it — of a language (or any system, really), the design tends to become apparent quicker. "When in Rome," and so forth. Cultural displeasure tends to disappear if you give the native way an earnest chance rather than resisting it. For example, in the beginning, marking identifiers as public by giving them a capital letter struck me as the ugliest thing ever. I don't mind it now. It's never going to be something I love looking at, but it does have the benefit of making declarations' visibility extremely obvious.

I don't think Go's popularity is due to Google at all. Google the company has never really promoted Go (unlike Microsoft with C# and Sun with Java, for example). Go is still treated as a bastard stepchild in many Google projects such as Protobuf/gRPC, Beam, and Google Cloud. The Go team has never seemed very enthusiastic about PR, either. There was that one big redesign of the Go site, but relatively little after that.

I think Go grew by word of mouth more than anything. Projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Traefik, etc. helped a lot. Don't forget that it took years for Go to become popular. It wasn't taken very seriously by many in the beginning. Go was not popular within Google until relatively recently. For many years the only serious thing written in Go internally at Google, as I understand it, was the dl.google.com backend.