And after whoever started the project gets their promotion, the product will be killed off and Google will chase another shiny thing. How much does anyone trust totally new Google things these days?

Didn’t Craigslist did basically that? I’m not familiar with recent developments but for decades they stayed small and focused and seemed to have done well.

Yes. They've stayed small and focused but while AFAIK they're still doing OK, the latest numbers I've seen on them listed about 50 employees. And I'm willing to bet most of them aren't unusually well compensated. I'm also not sure when I last heard Craigslist come up in conversation although I expect especially people in urban areas still use them for classified advertising.

Yeah, that was my point - they chose to stay small (this is both in focus of the company as well as number of employees).

I’d personally probably be happier in a small company than in one that is eternally chasing infinite growth (both in goals and in number of employees).

I worked for a very small company for a number of years and it was a pretty good run for the most part. That said, I'm in a significantly better place financially having worked for a reasonably big public company for about the past decade.