I think that it's just difficult to submit updates to Ubuntu or get them incorporated. I think you can just download the binary and put it in /usr/bin or clone and run go install as per the instructions.
That's bad practice though. Devs should be comfortable having older (security patched) versions of software in repos, which provide a valuable service for users.
It's hostile for devs to push PPAs only, as it implies that their ability to push updates faster is more important than the distro's review process.
Distros (Debian in particular comes to mind) have some really annoying packaging rules, and as a maintainer of a Go program, it's a huge pain, so we decided to just set up a repo with https://cloudsmith.com/ instead of trying to deal with that. They require every dependency (indirect or not) to be packaged separately. We don't have the time for that. Way simpler to just build a static binary and ship it.
