When I did this recently the max zip was 4GB- and that was only from doing zip64, regular old zip was 2GB limit. TGZ could do up to 50GB.

But these limits are weird because while file size limits do exist, they don't match Google's limits: 4GB is the limit for regular zip, zip64 has a limit of 16 exabytes. And TGZ's limit of 50GB shows that they they have the internal infrastructure to support building larger files too.

So, other than that most of their customers use Windows and they want to make takeout as annoying as possible, do they put that limit on it?

Yes, no automation and no incremental backups makes things so annoying.