The problem at its root is despite this stuff being the major external public appearance of Google, it is in fact all just a side show to the real Google -- which is all data centre hosted core services stuff doing ads, search, etc.
Behind all that stuff is an incredibly competent smart SRE team keeping the lights on and keeping things very efficient and reliable. And some boring but diligent SWEs writing the rather boring code to do all that boring stuff. That's what the real Google is, but it's invisible to the public.
But all that ads money needs to be spent somewhere. And you can't grow your staff forever doing "boring" stuff. And if there's an exciting interesting project inside Google it's flies to shit, people stepping over each other for promotion.
It's indirectly noticeable by YouTube not having gone out of business despite a free model with high costs. Note also how its biggest competitor, Twitch, is owned by another data center giant : Amazon (AWS).
The only way YouTube and Twitch can stay in business is because their respective owners have the scale to demand massive, massive peering discounts from "last-mile" ISPs and, at least in the case of Google, can avoid middle men on the intercontinental fiber links as they simply have their own cables where they don't need to pay rents to anyone.
YouTube has a lot of ads nowadays. Of course it can do that because it's in a quasi-monopolistic position, which is a direct result of Google cross-financing it from search ads revenue. (Similarly how Chrome got into its own position.)
Behind all that stuff is an incredibly competent smart SRE team keeping the lights on and keeping things very efficient and reliable. And some boring but diligent SWEs writing the rather boring code to do all that boring stuff. That's what the real Google is, but it's invisible to the public.
But all that ads money needs to be spent somewhere. And you can't grow your staff forever doing "boring" stuff. And if there's an exciting interesting project inside Google it's flies to shit, people stepping over each other for promotion.