A modern programming language that makes developers happier.

kotlinlang

The only thing I really like about the Go language is that your programs compile to a neat, native binary that's simple to distribute and run. I don't like much else about the language though and would love to use something like Kotlin Native as a Go replacement. Is Kotlin Native meant to be, or could grow into being, a competitor with Go in that sense?

Go statically links everything into the executable because it doesn't have support for dynamic linked libraries.  You can accomplish the same with any compiler/language that supports static linking.

on JVM, look at GraalVM.  You can use it for Kotlin files too.  Startup time is under 10ms when done this way (pretty much same as Go).  Has some compatibility issues w/ Java libs that use reflection, etc. so it has caveats.
K/N seems to be more for library sharing at this point.

Binaries produced by Kotlin/Native more similar to the output of C/C++ compiler, as it usually dynamically depends on libc, libm and other similar system libraries. So it could be used to compile self-contained programs. Full static linkage is possible as well, but unlikely makes sense.