> I believe everyone agrees that a "better C" has to have manual memory management.

This seems completely wrong. Manual memory management is perhaps C's most famous issue. I'm sure _someone_ thinks manual memory management is a feature rather than a bug, but I don't think there's any broad consensus about this at all.

Moreover, Go gives you a lot of levers to control your allocations, and with some care (probably less care than writing correct C code) you can avoid allocating at all (this is how Go's own runtime works).