As a software architect? Absolutely. Programming language designer? Not sure, neither C or Go are good languages in my personal opinion.

EDIT: I meant to write that I think very highly of him as an architect/developer.

Experience has shown that often “worse is better”. Go does an amazing job of balancing complexity and power. I haven’t seen a ”better” language that isn’t either slower, harder to become productive, or both.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better