Is there some sort of bizarro universe version of Hacker News that has been publishing "Uber is an awesome place to work!" articles?
If you keep reading, they touch on that several times. It sounds like Uber's lawyers complained to the judge and Google complained "Hey, you didn't ask us first" and then the judge yelled at Uber.
It's complicated by the fact that there are multiple suits going on, both the public lawsuit and some sort of arbitration, and Google has different lawyers representing them for the others.
In the end of the transcript of the session the quote is from, Google was saying they were only trying to redact sensitive PII in the employment agreement (the document that they were arguing about) like name, address, salary, etc. and everyone was OK with that.
Sounds like this and many other conflicts Google had with Mr. Lewandowsky over the years should have been dealt with in arbitration. This just looks like Google acting out a vendetta against Mr. Lewandowsky. They tolerated his actions when he worked for them and even after he left to work for himself, but turned against him once he joined a competitor.
While on paper, it doesn't appear that Mr. Lewandowsky is a saint, Google doesn't look good here either. Google's behavior here should give any engineer pause about considering Google as a place to work. California doesn't allow non-compete agreements, and this looks like Google attempting to achieve the effects of a non-compete through litigation. "If we can't hire and keep Mr. Lewandowsky, then we'll make sure our competitors can't either."