Earlier quoted context omitted.
Memory safety is not the alpha and omega of programming languages. People do not write million lines of code applications in bash, for a reason, trade-offs are to be made. That said I agree they should have picked Go instead /s.
I'm not such a lover of Go, but: non-sarcastically, Go may well have been a good choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History
> Go was publicly announced in November 2009,[29] and version 1.0 was released in March 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)#Hist...
The brand-new language that Google just announced last year was probably not considered a serious option here.