If you want to think of it that way (as a way to be dismissive), sure. 'I can deploy by scping the file from my workstation to the server' is kind of a late 90s throwback, but golang is a 70s throwback, so I guess it fits? In any system at scale, you still have to solve for the more important problems of managing the infrastructure. I don't see what's special or better about compiling everything into a single binary, apart from fetishizing the executable format. As a practical matter, it still fundamentally has the 'one file' nature. The way I see it, Docker is basically this same thing, generalized to be independent of the language/application/platform. Google uses MPM and hermetic packaging of configuration with binaries. When we upgraded to Perl, I liked that system so we designed deployment around 'PAR' files in a similar way, bundling all of the dependencies together with the application in the CI build process, and I wrote a tiny bit of infrastructure that essentially moved a symlink to make the new version live. When I was stuck doing a web application in Java 15 years ago, I hated everything about it except for the deployment story, which boiled down to a single.

Golang write to file