This is good feedback and am sure it is coming out of pain of everyday usage. In my opinion, they have a mammoth that needs heavy maintenance. What do ya think?
I'll preface this with: I am in no way affiliated with O'Reilly. I would suggest this book for a deeper look into Go's concurrency http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920046189.do While Go does have channels to allow concurrent communication, it also allows the use of mutexes for concurrency similar to c/c++. And on the flip side, there's things like libmill in C that will give you Go-like concurrency. It is also worthwhile looking at how Go's memory model works (it's similar to tcmalloc). Additionally, looking at the implementation of channels maybe interesting for you. It consists of a buffer that gets memcopy'd with mutexes for synchronization, granted, that's a very simplified view of it.
Well fullstack Javascript is pretty common, you can use express or Koa, and passport works well for auth. Really you could use any backend and be just fine, whether it's Python, Ruby, Go, Elixir, etc. Burger (BGR) stack is popping up lately too http://go-talks.appspot.com/github.com/gophercon/2016-talks/.... Additionally things like Redux and Relay make it very nice to communicate between React and your backend. Otherwise, just speaking ajax to the backend works.
You could use something like Django as an API for React to hit. It has user auth, and if you use django-rest-framework it works flawlessly with React/webpack
My understanding of Smalltalk is extremely small, but, this is an apple to well a tree, so smalltalk images and docker images are both ways to persist some sort of state at runtime, however, Smalltalk images are more like configuration while docker images are more of an entire environment.
I pulled the trigger at work that all new services we build in Node use Koa if the need a web framework because it utilizes ES6/7 features most effectively while still having a good bit of simplicity. That said, all of our legacy services, in Node, that need a web framework use Express. I find Express is a good beginner web framework and then once you understand ES 6/7 features in more depth, Koa becomes rather easy to switch to.
