The website in itself does not give me an understanding of whatever the hell they're doing. I'm a computer engineering undergrad and I've done FPGA's before. I don't see what's "code in go and deploy FPGA's to the cloud". I think that putting some code and other actual use cases to the website would be nice.
Looking at some of the examples it seems to me that you'd still need to know hardware programming, memory etc. Now my comment seems very snarky, but I still think that it's a huge achievement to have gotten this far with this and I wish them luck! I just don't get the target user base.
Most of the GNU utilities are available from Homebrew (dupes repo iirc) and they work seamlessly since it is prefixed with a g-. However force linking is allowed too so your workflow is rarely affected.
I find it strange that you like apt because IMO it's not as nice as other full fledged package manages (disclaimer: I'm a big portage fanboy).
IMO the distro that actually made me realize that after some good configuring Linux can just work is Gentoo. After Portage no package manager was ever good enough for me.
I use ROS heavily and also a core contributor but I personally I do not like using Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi's for it. However this is the first time I'm hearing of Ubuntu Core so maybe I'll give it a go. My preferred method is Gentoo Linux with an external build bot that updates the images etc.
Changing behavior of something that is as popular as curl to protect edge cases is strange, to say the least.