The expressions “go to sleep” and “go to work” are frozen expressions from a time when “go to” was used as an ingressive aspect marker. Here, “work” is not a place but a verb and nowadays would require “get to work” or “go to working”, as in “He went to working on the broken bicycle”. “He went to work on the broken bicycle” would mean he started working on it, but you can’t say that with any other verbs except “sleep” and “work”.
This is the subtle understanding of grammar that mavens lack; they have little to no understanding of grammar with all its complexity nor of the history of the language. What happens is they, the mavens, do a lot of ratiocination, trying to make the usage fit into the few patterns of the language they do know about and using their idea of grammatical logic, or they dismiss the wholle thing as either “crazy English” or “bad English”.