Microsoft chose Go for tsc rewrite. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/typescript-native-...
And then there's esbuild, also in Go, which revolutionized web bundling speed https://esbuild.github.io
It's impossible to do this kind of rewrite from a GC language to a non GC one, especially Rust where the object soup of typescript will probably cause the borrow checker to explode.
I think that if MS or someone else decided to write a typescript type checker from scratch there is a high chance Rust will be chosen.
Which is not to say that Go can't do well in tooling. Only that Go was not necessarily their first choice.
It doesn't even have advanced generics like TypeScript, nor union types. No classes and no heritance either.
Unless you have a source, I'd say that's a very debatable speculation.
My guess is they chose Go for the same reason most users do: it's good enough, easy to grasp, has a decent std lib and is easy to grasp.
Around the 13 minute mark, Anders goes into it. IIRC, the big things were the GC and them both supporting cyclic data structures.
Universal applicability may not be necessary to write a Ruby installer, but it certainly is to have any hope of taking C's crown.