I've heard this to, but haven't observed it in my part of the industry (systems/PL research with lots of undergrad and grad interns from top ranked schools, who are usually the PL early adopters). Scala has been getting more interest lately, and there is growing interest in Rust.

The thing is, Go is particularly not interesting for PL researchers and geeks seeking novelty. It's more of a boring, pragmatic language. Elixir, rust et al. are much more funny, IMHO. That might be the explanation.

Yea, but isn't Go supposed to be a systems language? You might expect it to pop up more with systems candidates.