"The Go devs have since stated that they were surprised to see that a lot of Go converts were from dynamic languages like Python and not C or C++. Go still makes sense for a lot of apps ... somewhere, however, that has been extrapolated to the idea that Go is a good language for writing web apps."
I think this is the crux of the question. And heck, it's very easy to spin up a web server in Go, and so many intro examples focus on that.
And elixir/erlang are great for writing custom servers handling custom protocols.... but you're better off just dropping in Cowboy and working at a higher level.
Go is really compelling in producing a single-binary application... but for web apps, I think Elixir wins because it's working at a much higher level, and thus you're more productive.
Here I am pimping my own stuff but I wrote a related article on this:
http://lebo.io/2015/06/22/the-unix-philosophy-and-elixir-as-...