Google on the other hand has like 60,000 employees and IPO'd over a decade ago. It almost goes without saying that, as a large, more mature company it's a lot harder to keep employees happy.
So... not really a fair comparison IMO.
I get that pre IPO companies have that advantage, but a company like Google which makes absurd amounts of money also has its advantages, like being able to afford giving their employees high salaries and also better work life balance. I am not sure that Google gives its employees that though, at least not the latter. Plus, a more mature company should have its processes already ironed out and no more growing pains.
A company like Airbnb hasn't gone through like 1/100000 of the pains that Google has gone through. Think of all the products Google has built (some successful and some not), think of all the economic environments Google has had to go through (2000 meltdown, 2008 meltdown), think of all the employees who have worked there (there's 60k now, but google has probable cycled through 5x that amount).
Airbnb has made like, one product? Through a relatively small stretch of time, while probably still using most of their original employees. It's an electric time to be at Airbnb no doubt, but I wouldn't trumpeted them as the best place to work just yet.
I've been at Google for over a year, and I'd say that you get as much "work-life balance" as you can be bothered to make for yourself. As far as I can tell there's no penalty for choosing to do that, but not everybody does.
"We're going to have a baby!" "I just got engaged." "We just hired this great engineer." "We're going to Hawaii for Christmas."
I could go on, but you get the point. Once you've had Google's free food and other perks for a while, they become baseline. They're just part of what's normal.