That's good context! Perhaps there's some institutional memory from that, i.e. that they regretted that trade-off, in retrospect.

Nobody in charge now was involved then. The people in charge now are carpetbaggers.

For the context of this decision, this is strictly false: Larry and Sergey are on the board and on the executive committee. If it wasn't a board decision, it was at least an executive committee decision.

Yeah but they were smaller then. Google's hiring aparatus is massive now. It's clearly far too tricky to surgically change hiring. They struggled as is with the hiring freezes.

In what world is the VP not signing offer letters harder than firing staff already at work?

Sure, that's basically a hiring freeze or slowdown. They did that. What they clearly suck at (btw I'm not defending them, just pointing out the reality) is refocusing hiring priorities. There are tons of candidates already in pipelines, etc. so that seems to be somewhat complex.

Middle management convincing the VP that this candidate super-aligns with company strategy (AI or whatever) and said VP must create an exception for the hiring freeze.