The first answer to this Quora question by one of the developers of D explains a few other points and also what golang is really good at:
https://www.quora.com/Which-language-has-the-brightest-futur...
The type system not being "strong" simply means that you put logic in functions and methods instead of magic parts of the type system.
And Go can absolutely make abstractions. The standard library is full of abstractions. Every Go package is an abstraction. Hell, every function is an abstraction.
And are they easy to maintain?