The only conclusion I can draw from this is that some engineers are not great at arguing the merits and challenges of a programming language. GC vs non-GC should be one of the first and most straightforward decisions made when picking a language. It's hard to tell in this situation given that there are no concrete examples of what the arguments were, but if one is seriously considering Go for a domain, then they don't actually need the complexity a non-GC language brings.

If anything, maybe this says there is room for a Rust-like GC'd language.