It did, but if you recall it came with a lot of "We have no idea why you need this" from Pike and friends. Which, of course, makes sense when you remember that they don't use the go toolchain inside Google. They use Google's toolchain, which already supports things like code generation and build dependency management in a far more elegant way. Had Go not transitioned to a community project, I expect we would have seen the same "We have no idea why you need this" from the Go project as that is another thing already handled by Google's tooling.

The parent's experience comes from similar sized companies as Google who have similar kinds of tooling as Google. His question comes not from a "why would you need this kind of feature?" in concept, but more of a "why would you not use the tooling you already have?" angle. And, to be fair, none of this is needed where you have better tooling, but the better tooling we know tends to require entire teams to maintain it, which is unrealistic for individuals to small organizations. So, this is a pretty good half-measure to allow the rest of us to play the same game in a smaller way.