to op: glad you're taking time to check out golang. I too have worked mainly as PHP dev since 1999 or so, and recognize most of what you are saying. I loved the new era of php with the composer ecosystem, but after investing too many hours into Laravel, i finally had enough when I realized I could not even use the backtraces to debug some issue I was having after upgrading. So I decided to never touch it again.
Coming from php to golang is insane, you will be very impressed by all the mature and insanely fast tooling.
For example I now have test suite running in about 0.3 seconds, where my last PHP (laravel) app took about 20 minutes testing similar stuff.
Yea, personally I am excited to see what will come out of the Siri developers kit that was announced this week.
I do not understand how/why bots would replace apps. Perhaps I am narrow-minded about this, but personally I prefer to stay in (some) control of my devices and work-flow.
Cloud based bots are a sad situation, where end user is getting further out of control. But it doesn't have to be like this. Check out https://mycroft.ai/