Go channels are bad

Effective Go has always said:

Do not communicate by sharing memory; instead, share memory by communicating.

This approach can be taken too far. Reference counts may be best done by putting a mutex around an integer variable, for instance.

https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#sharing

I thought Go had gc. Why would you ever need reference counts?

Non-memory resources that exist within your application.

Example: Perhaps once no instances of an object are in use, you want to remove that object from persistent storage such as a DB.

Does Go not have finalizers? These are mostly solved problems since the Smalltalk era. Haven't learned Go yet and from what I read I'd be better off with Rust or something that would stretch my brain more like Haskell. When I read about it I get the sense that we are reinventing stuff from the 90s. But hey, it's hip.