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It sounds like a gas lighting attempt to paint employees as selfish and entitled children worried about losing their toys. Most people don't care about that stuff, it's all superficial anyway. Things like this usually means employees asking about why benefits are cut for them and not for executives.

Further down in in the article, if readers made it that far, it implies just that:

> Pichai dodged employee questions asking about cost-cutting executive compensation. Pichai brought in total pay last year of $6.3 million, while other top executives made more than $28 million.

The later on:

> Bret Hill, Google's vice president of "total rewards," fielded a question about raises, equity and bonuses and how they will be affected by the changes. He said the company doesn't plan to deviate from paying workers “at the top end of the market so we can be competitive.”

Which leads me to believe employees know what they're talking about, and the swag question near the top is just clickbait. Employees actually want real answers, and they got none.

can't speak for everyone else, but it seems like a canary. They grew really fast the last few years, so many people joined google recently, with all their reputation for tons of perks. Their new perks are going away, that they just joined for. That's probably a bit of a shock as well.

> they simply don't understand the belt-tightening when they think the company is doing well, or something else?

When you make a median of $300k, being told you need to cut a $50 sweatshirt this year out of the budget, its pretty confusing and concerning.

> is it because the travel was fun, or effective for project success, or effective for personal advancement, or something else?

Probably all of the above. With COVID, lots of teams (at lots of companies) became more distributed, and meeting in person is important occasionally (IMO). Travel is fun, and google tends to be in the fun cities with fun offices (SF, NYC, etc) so traveling to those cities is probably an enjoyable trip compared to flying to eg. Milwaukee. With a "fun budget" even if you have to work, you'll probably enjoy those trips beyond the work.

> How concerned are people about possible layoffs, possible declining TC, and/or possible changing nature of the work lifestyle?

I imagine considering the the earlier claims of "20% productivity increase", product cuts and stalled hiring, layoffs probably feel around the corner for many people. Having to output 20% more is no easy feat unless you really weren't working very hard.

> Are there any pre-existing concerns that talks of belt-tightening are adding to?

I think its just that lots of people are new to this lucrative perk-filled rich company and its an affront to their expectations and potentially reason for joining.

I'm not a googler, but I'd see this as a canary. Steve Blank's[1] The Elves leave Middle earth - The sodas are no longer free explains why auch "small" changes portend larger cultural shifts

1. https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

In a distributed company travel becomes essential to keep team coherence: anything from team activities to meeting up to decide on the direction of big projects (no online tool can beat a single room with a single whiteboard and a single marker in terms of usability and speed).

There are also meetings and travel to partners, to industry conferences and forums etc. (depends on teams).

In "tough times" all that is suddenly cut off, and only "essential travel" is allowed. But then some teams get to spend two weeks in Malibu on an "essential travel spa retreat" while their teams cannot even send engineers to a high stakes technical discussions with external party integrations. And of course "essential travel" somehow doesn't include various levels of sales, management and marketing.

So, people get grumpy.

Not Google specifically, but in general:

1. Some people are excessively (IMO) attracted to swag and taking away any benefit, however minor, often attracts outsized opposition.

2. Especially people who aren't on the road most of the time, find a trip to an event a nice change of pace and an opportunity to develop professional connections both within your own company and elsewhere. There is business value but it's also often viewed as a significant perk.

3. Well, Pichai has made statements at least suggestive of staffing cuts. And even if there's some trueing up going on with RSUs, I expect a lot of employees used to getting a lot of their comp in stock in a rising market are looking at effectively significant cuts to their TC.