Interesting hypothesis. I can't comment on Pike's history here, but at Google there's certainly a noticeable difference between old special cases that were built pre-2015 ish, and the modern world where everything is very cohesive. I get the impression that there was a big push to achieve that, led from around that time by various products. It's hit some areas more than others, but there do seem to be almost no new products building in the way you've described now.