Go has the benefit of not having to reach a distributed consensus amongst a variety of individual browser vendors. Try compiling a large Go project with tinygo to get a glimpse of what it's like to have to deal with multiple independent runtimes [1]. If the browser vendors had been able to ship ES4 or ES5 with module support between 1999 and 2009, then Node probably would have implemented it from the very beginning, and there would be no dichotomy between CJS and ESM.
