My 2 cents: OWNERS is fairly useful, if only as a form of automating code reviewer selection. Readabilty is a massive drag on org-wide productivity. I have had diffs/CLs take MONTHS to be approved by every Tom Dick and Harry whose claws were added to my code and made me re-design whole project approaches, and they were only there because they're supposed to check if my new-lines are in the right spot for that language. I thought about quitting.
I noticed a lot of people don't understand both the limitations of code reviews, and what issues they can and should solve. Writing good critique (of anything, not just code) is hard, we don't train people to do it, and usually don't even regard this as something that needs training and understanding.
Going from FB to $REDACTED to Oculus was a pretty wild ride, there were a lot of different cultures, though I think generally speaking the best qualities filtered through.
(also, howdy former teammate)
Google workers are groomed to believe Google is the best, and hence they are too. A corollary of that, then, is that nobody else has it that good, when in fact, others sometimes have it better.