Surely this is a consequence of management and corporate ideology, rather than a natural outcome of having some arbitrary number of devs in a room. A good project manager doesn't allow great ideas to die on the vine unless there is pressure to do so, and that pressure is not coming from the team or customers -- it's coming from the top of the company.

For all of his and Apple's faults, Jobs aggressively fostered a culture of "good is the enemy of perfect," which placed the focus on polished features instead of the dull hum of incremental development. And that bucking of homogenization is what led to such a rabid base of loyalists, as consumers tuned in to that momentum of (albeit perceived) innovation.

Google, on the other hand, has never really had a fan base to speak of, and the few remaining loyalists are rapidly disappearing. I genuinely have never met a consumer or dev who believes Google is at the bleeding edge of any feature. That is wholly reflective of Page and Brin's ideologies, who fostered a culture of "over-engineer, refactor and ship incomplete," which is exactly what you're describing. Angular, for example, is the perfect representation of the Page/Brin ideology, and that's why nobody uses it.