Would they have less impact? Or would it have the same impact, just distributed across many more outages?

You can rely on Google outages being very few and far between, and recovering pretty fast. For the benefits you get from such a connected ecosystem, I'm not sure anyone is net positive from using a variety of different tools rather than Google supplying many of them.

Compare closing down one road for repair a day per year to closing down all roads one day a year.

I'm not sure I see that as a fair comparison. I think it's best to use the same durations for this, as an entire day changes the level of impact. <1hr outages have a fraction of the impact that an entire days outage might have.

It's obviously subjective, but even with our entire work leaning on Google– from GMail, GDrive and Google Docs, through to all our infrastructure being in GCP– todays outage just meant everyone took an hour break. History suggests we won't see another of these for another year, so everyone taking a collective 60m break has been minimally impactful vs many smaller, isolated outages spread over the year.

Just think if Google actually decided to "take the day off"

...like I did a dozen+ years ago: https://antipaucity.com/2008/01/09/what-if-google-took-the-d...