Go is used for many popular projects like Kubernetes, Docker, Prometheus, and Ethereum due to its advantages like being statically compiled, allowing for easy distribution and parallelism. Google migrated its dl.google.com download service from C++ to Go because the Go version was much less code, more readable, testable, and fixed HTTP issues while having equal or better performance. Go's creators aimed to design a language that is simple yet powerful for building reliable and efficient software in the modern era.