>This still kills the possibility of quickly collaborating with someone on a project in your free time. Any time you want to even start working on something together, you have to wait a couple of days for approval.

This depends on the project. If you and the project maintainer are ok with Google maintaining copyright over the code, there's a self-approval process that takes ~2 minutes.

And of course, that's only necessary if I'm working on the side project using company resources. If I'm not, I literally can't do the self-approval. There's only an issue if you want to maintain copyright should you want to monetize your product. Most hobby projects won't encounter those issues.