The core problem here is that the Node community invented/popularized a connotation of "blocking" and "non-blocking" that is excessively event-loop-specific. The important difference in their connotation is that code that blocks blocks the whole OS process. The conventional meaning of the term referred just blocking the running thread.

In normal Go, nothing is blocking in the Node sense. (Oh, if you put your mind to it you can manage it, but I've never once encountered this as an practical problem, either in Go or the equivalents you can do in Erlang if you put your mind to it.)

This has profound changes on how you write code.

It's true, Go is not magic. It's just another threaded language in most ways, with the "real" magic in the community best practices around sharing by communicating instead of communicating by sharing. In theory, you could write an equivalent set of C libraries and get most of the same things, but you'd have a lot of library to write. (This is why things like porting C goroutines to C have a hard time getting traction. It can be done, but it's actually the easy part. Also, you'd still be in C, which is its own discussion. But you can get the concurrency.)

The real issue here isn't that Go is necessarily exceptionally strong at concurrency, the real issue is that Node is exceptionally weak. It introduces this new concept of "blocking" that only exists in the first place because it is weak, and then makes you worry about it continuously, to the point that many people seem to internalize the concept as what concurrency is, when it isn't. It's really just something Node laid on you. So when you step out of Node, and you see a community that isn't visibly as worried about "blocking" as the Node community, someone trained by Node thinks they are seeing a community that "isn't good at concurrency". My gosh! Look how cavalier they are about "blocking"! Look how they tell people not to worry about it, and how casual they are about having users wrapping library code in goroutines and explicitly telling library writers not to do the concurrency themselves. But what you're seeing is what happens when you simply no longer have the problems Node and "event-based code" brings to the table. Go is not magic in the general case, but, honestly, when someone coming from the Node world picks up Go, I can see why they might go through a period where they sort of think it is. There are really differences in code style, and how easy it is to write correct code.

You have to make sure you're not letting the limitations of one connotation of "blocking" spill over into the other, or you will have problems. (True in both directions.)

To speak to someone else's point, "futures" in Go don't "suck", they basically don't exist. If you're writing in a recognizably "futures" fashion, you are not writing idiomatic or even particularly good Go. You don't need futures, because (what are today called) futures are basically an embedding of a concurrency-aware language into a non-concurrency-aware language, and you don't need them when the language you're working in is already concurrency-aware. That's why you don't see futures in Haskell or Erlang either. (I have to qualify with "what are today called" because the term has drifted; for instance, Haskell does have explicit support for an older academic definition of the term with MVars, but modern software engineers are not using the term that way.)