Go GC is still pretty immature compared to the best Java systems.

And there were really quite good GC developed in the 90s. GC systems with predictable pause times (if you know the load) very much exist.

So if you are not loading arbitrary code you can do a lot with a memory safe GC system.

However I do think more could have been done in that space in the last 20 years instead of having so much C code everywhere.