Does anyone know who or what the legal entity "The Go Authors" is/are?
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It's a shorthand referring to all authors in the same way as "The Android Open Source Project". Their open source projects don't use copyright assignment so there are many copyright owners.
cla.developers.google.com/about/google-i is what they have individuals sign to contribute to any projects.
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I assume that, but has this actually been validated via a lawyer or the courts? Because if I copy the file + LICENSE, it's not clear who the copyright owner is.
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There's no requirement to provide a list of the copyright owners. The licenses require you preserve the copyright notices and the authors have chosen to refer to themselves as "The Go Authors" or "The Android Open Source Project" so you just have to preserve the notice as is.
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The copyright statement is different than the license and different laws apply.
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In this case the individual files refer to an actual notice elsewhere instead of having a bunch of them for each file. They distribute each notice variation with software like Android. If a project has 10 files different variations of the notice, they actually ship 10 of them.
P.s. IMO each file needs to be properly tagged individually. No implicit references to external files.
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For example, look at this part of the Bionic notice:
android.googlesource.com/platform/bioni
They've gathered up all variations of the actual copyright notices and that means they have a bunch of essentially the same ones with different years.
For their own projects, they make a central one.