I agree with you on how much innovation occurred at google, but I think the timeline of when these innovations occurred vs when leetcode interviews really took hold is what the commenters are addressing. In the old days they had crazy hiring processes where riding a unicycle helped your case. This ushered in a group of very brilliant creatives that innovated. Now, most hires are required to memorize data structures and algorithms- things that a lot of the smart creative people loathe to do, and as a result the pace of innovation has slowed to almost a halt.

My personal opinion is that there were too many chefs in the kitchen and google is now trying to optimize the “creative leader” to “can pump out rote code” ratio.