Not a Google employee, but yes - users absolutely do not care about manipulating individual cookie key/value pairs (and if they did, they would be web developers and know how to open Developer Tools).

Of course an average user does not bother about these controls. They don't even need to know what cookies are. Maybe they don't care today but now you are not even giving them opportunity to learn and take control back.

The argument that no one uses it is just a front. Real reason is it serves in Google's interest to remove these and that is why they are doing it. Just like GTalk and RSS.

Just out of curiosity, what's the percentage of users outside of devs do you think care about this feature?

You don't need Google employees for that. Majority of the comments on this post are people telling others that if they care they can use developer tools to find the functionality so they should shut up about this change.

And so it goes....