Pure speculation on my part, but it sounds like an organizational case of ADHD or Magpie driven development. A new project is started and everyone jumps ship before it is ready, leaving some other team to come in and continue before jumping. Repeat this over a few times in a product and you end up with an unusable mess. This might explain it.

Friend of mine that worked as a manager for a few years at google. Said he found it extremely difficult to get people to work on stuff that wasn't shiny and to stop refactoring stuff that was good enough.

yeah the culture is all based on promotions.. and you get them by launching something new, not by maintaining or improving existing systems. hence what you said

Google is a large company. I have respect for its core product that is google search. It’s insanely fast and reliable. I can’t remember the last time it was down. Mostly gets the answers I need at the top (I use adblockers so ads aren’t a problem)

The rest of Google has other priorities though. Even gmail’s iOS app had pretty glaring bug that it couldn’t mark a message read.

Google docs fails to save at times. YouTube Kids is just an awful mess. Don’t let your kids even near it. Google Cloud isn’t as reliable as the other clouds. Google can’t do proper human support. They don’t believe in it. If you’re a small shop, going with Google for anything critical is just going to be a disappointment.

Google Search though. I have an insane amount of respect for their engineers who work on performance and reliability.

On the tooling side, I think Steve Yegge's infamous and very entertaining platform rant from 2011 nails it: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 tl;dr Google doesn't have the platform mentality in its culture, unlike Amazon and MS.