I am actually happy that life becomes more difficult the bigger companies get. It was a good thing that Microsoft got some heat in the 90s and stopped dominating the market. I hope that Facebook and Apple also will also get more scrutiny.
Assuming you mean that the smaller group accomplishing half the work is "useful" and the larger group also accomplishing half the work is "not useful", it certainly doesn't mean that.
It means, very clearly, that the number of "not useful" people increases linearly with size, and the number of "useful" people increases sublinearly. But even if your definition of "size" included only useful people, x^2 is a polynomial function of x, not an exponential function of it.
Also, there's no actual facts about Google in that article.
Self-driving car team was picked up wholesale from a university, DeepMind was an acquisition, most of what Google Lens is was from an acquisition. Projects like Ara, Jacquard, and Tango were all from Motorola's ATAP division, which they acquired. Almost anything you see coming out of Google can be traced back to an existing thing that Google purchased, rebranded, and relaunched.
cromwellian's comment probably lends to explaining some of why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15519220
Many of Google's products did start from acquisitions. Though those startups can't claim all the credit. Most wouldn't have become as big as they are now without the capital and talent that Google brought to them.