I think you may be falling for the SV cult of personality fallacy. There are still literally thousands of individuals you've never heard of working on organic search quality at Google who care very much about quality organic results. :)
So yeah I totally agree, be it Google, Apple, Microsoft, ... A large amount of people around here are so used to small team startup represented by their founder that they always feel the need in similar stories to make a cult of personality for / against someone as if he was the product he worked for.
Edit: And, I did mention more focus on ads and widgets versus the actual organic results. If those weren't more important, why are they at the top, crowding organics down? The revenue isn't really coming from the organics themselves.
(And while Google keeps adding heuristics I wish some of those many developers and researchers would simply occasionally try the product and ban, purge the very obvious content farm and spam sites)