LLD is substantially faster than gold (largely because it does multithreading vastly better, but for other reasons as well, LLD discards some long-held linking semantics in the name of speed).

It took a ground-up rewrite to make it so. Rui Ueyama was employed by Google while he wrote LLD for ELF--it was his primary assignment, bought and paid for by Google.

So Google didn't just wait. It moved on to the next step.