I agree. The limited expressiveness in Go also worked as an advantage because of its simplicity. Additionally, as the article mentions, the lack of lambdas made the syntax less convenient. For me, it struck a good balance before generics and other features were added.
What an amazing track record from Joel Spolsky: Launched Fog Creek, then StackOverflow, Trello and now Glitch (which I think is the successor of Fog Creek)
I switched from google closure to esbuild and it is amazing how fast and well it works. It even generates smaller code in my use case (200k lines app).
Also the creator is really nice. He implemented two features I requested right away, which surprised me a lot. What a great project!
I have noticed that the AST nodes don't have a parent reference. I wonder how it knows for example when encountering a "continue LABEL" that the code is nested maybe deeply in a loop with that label. The only way I would think of is traversing the tree up but I think there is no way of doing this. How do they do it?