The one thing I wish Go had more than anything is read-only slices (like C#).
The one thing I wish more other languages had that Go has is structural typing (anything with Foo() method can be used as an interface { Foo() }.
Interesting approach regarding using strings as containers for raw bytes, but when you create one over a []byte I believe it makes a copy almost always (always?) so you can’t get a zero-cost read-only view of the data to pass to other functions.
One can use unsafe for a zero-copy conversion, but now you are breaking the semantics: a string becomes mutable, because its underlying bytes are mutable.
Or! One can often handle strings and bytes interchangeably with generics: https://github.com/clipperhouse/stringish
On the other hand, now that we have iterators in Go, you can create a wrapper for []byte that only allows reading, yet is iterable.
But then we're abstracting away, which is a no-go in Go and also creates problems later on when you get custom types with custom logic.
My guess is that it is due to many developers bringing reference semantics with them from other languages to Go. It leads to thinking about data in terms of pointers instead of values.