Lack of generics didn't prevent from creating many useful projects in Go such as Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Terraform, etcd, minio, Caddy, Traefik, and many others from the list at https://github.com/search?q=language%3Ago+stars%3A%3E10000&t... . I haven't heard of useful Go projects, which couldn't be written because of lack of generics before Go1.18, and which have been created after that. Also I'm unaware of useful projects, which benefitted from generics in any measurable way.