There is little difference here between killed and sold. Squarespace charges 66% more per year for .com domain, so it is going to make sense to transfer out for most people. Same result as if Google killed it, just a slightly longer window to go through the hassle of transferring.

For stuff like stadia, which has no real identical products, a transfer would indeed be nicer.

But the whole sell of the google domains product is that you are getting a domain from Google. If it is no longer from google, the product is largely indistinguishable from those from other large cloud providers like Cloudflare or AWS (or more boutique or focused offerings like Porkbun and Namecheap).

I mean, they're domains, you can't kill them.

This is like saying Photos isn't killed because they didn't delete old photos when you exceed your new low quota.

That's very different from "killed".

They're transferring the user's assets, the domains, and killing the product (Google Domains).