> there was a lot of consensus in the community, including widely-used and pretty mature tooling

At the time the community was pretty fragmented between vanilla GOPATH, vendoring, godep, and one or two others that are escaping my memory. I don't think that meets my criteria for "a lot of consensus".

Probably a better example would be the type alias stuff that was introduced pretty explicitly to support Google's use case without much consultation from the wider community. That caused some kerfuffle as well; however, that also caused the maintainers to change their stance and lean into the community a lot more.

But yes, both of these examples predate any formal "rules of engagement" with the community and things have generally been better since. Moreover, these are the only two examples I can think of where the Go team pushed through some controversial, significant change. The Go team is extremely conservative (which is something I value, for the record), and far more likely to make no change at all even when there is a lot of enthusiasm for some particular change.