That's what makes it approachable (though I don't agree it has an semblance to go other than "FROM <ref>" being fully qualified (minus the carve-out for Hub), but even then it can absolutely act more like a local import if you have an image with that ref locally (or you can even override it in your build command in a couple of different ways).
Also note, Docker can build whatever format you want, it just defaults to the Dockerfile format, but you can give it whatever syntax parser you want.
Docker wasn't stolen from anything. It built on top of existing things, even worked on new things, and provided a nice abstraction to everything.
> provide something like Dockerfile that's less golang-inspired and more linux-inspired
What? Is the thing that's golang inspired the image references? OK...