I wasn’t going to comment on this article, but since I saw a fresh link to it today, two important points:

1. The vendor idea didn’t come from Google. That is, the Go team at Google did not design vendor. We adopted a design by Keith Rarick, author of godep, with essentially no changes except substituting “vendor” for “ext” as the name. https://golang.org/s/go15vendor has a link to the public mailing list thread where Keith proposed it and, after discussion on the list and video calls with all the vendoring tool authors at the time, we said “sure, sounds good.”
2. The alias proposal does solve a real problem that exists outside Google. Clearly we didn’t do a good enough job explaining that. I tried to do that in my talk at GothamGo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6Cw9iCDVcU) which became this article: https://talks.golang.org/2016/refactor.article.