Who doesn’t occasionally do anti-Google pieces? I’d be more skeptical if they didn’t!

That said, this does smell like a hit job.

Listened to a short podcast (9 minutes) with the author of The Wall Street Journal piece, and my impression was this was done as an investigative piece to see if they could find any bad actors using the system Gmail. they weren't able to find any specific actors, but they spelled out how the system was used and potentially how it could be abused.

Podcast: https://pca.st/9jFw