Go solves the date parsing by using a magical reference date.
You start with this date
Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006
Adjust it into whatever format that you use and use it for parsing dates.
This is neat solution. It would be even better if the go documentation for time.Parse were to mention it.
I found the solution here: https://programming.guide/go/format-parse-string-time-date-example.html
This has now been raised as https://github.com/golang/go/issues/48757