I think you will find that hiring skilled researchers and telling them that they cannot say anything publicly is a hard row to hoe.

Apple seems to be doing that just fine and with huge success. They are exceedingly good at silencing every single employee to not speak about any kind of internal dissent or HR issues like this.

Perhaps, but hiring skilled researchers who do not think they need to say whatever they want is probably not as hard.

Importantly, Google offers great work conditions, access to their intellectual property and different evaluation criteria. Many prefer that and other benefits over the stresses of a proper academic career.

This is the most curious part: hiring those two individual researchers, who clearly didn't have an understanding of the nature of public communication, was incredibly naive and asking for disaster. There is no other outcome. It kind of implies a total lack of understanding of human nature on the part of those doing the hiring. "What were they thinking?" is the only thing that comes to mind.

It's a very, very tricky thing to do to hire your own public critics, that has to be done very carefully and with a lot of parameters.