Another (maybe even more) important motivation was to have simple, statically-typed language so that new hires can contribute to the codebase faster and the code itself is more standardized and easier to maintain at large scale.
They basically got there with Java + some frameworks. It's not the best (I'd like NodeJS), but it works and has a huge ecosystem already, and anyone can use it. Some people complain that Golang is designed specifically for its original use case of specialized web backends and isn't great otherwise, or that its main design goal was being "not C++."
A few people at Google did, as far as I'm aware it didn't start as some officially sanctioned project at the company. golang has its own sets of challenges due to the limitations of the language and its error prone bare bones threading model.
These aren't high-volume, they're just web interfaces used internally by hundreds of people. Golang wasn't well-received either in our dept. Java would've saved us a lot of headache, a phrase I never thought I'd say; adjacent teams use it for similar things.
