Yeah I could have omitted that line, but I do still think there's truth in it. If it weren't from a large company writing a ton of tooling in it (Kubernetes in particular), I think adoption would be significantly lower. It would be nonzero, and I don't mean to suggest it would be zero, but it would not be in the "top popularity class" in my opinion were it to not have that marketing arm behind it. I also think it's more optimized to Google's developers (read: huge army of disparate technical levels) than small/medium or even some larger shops. It's great that Kubernetes can be written in it, and that's a point in favor of it. But that doesn't make it a great language.
What marketing? The only time I hear that is about people mad at Go being popular and not liking it, I've never seen marketing from Google toward Go. The language is popular because it's powerful and yet very simple to onboard, the standard lib is good as well as the documentation, that's why it's popular not because of Google.
You mention Kubernetes, but forgot all the other widely used projects that are not from Google: Docker, Grafana, etcd, all the Hashicorp tools ( terraform, packer, consul .. ), Prometheus, InfluxDB, Hugo, CockroachDB ect ...
