Sure, when a random programmer on the street says a language "has generics," we mean "generics that I can use to extend my data model," or something similar.

But in this talk, we have one of the creators of the language saying "you don't actually need generics," when what he meant was "you only need the generics I gave you."

Go has, from the very beginning, acknowledged the importance of generics, and offered them to users of the language. But, until fairly recently, Go didn't trust users to use generics in any but a few specific cases.

The example in the article was about having arrays of ints and the like.