I'm not defending Google here, but once I worked for a company whose web support strategy consisted of explicitly supporting a specific subset of browsers, and have a user-agent allowlist to pick if a request loaded the current version of the page or a legacy, feature incomplete but broadly supported version. The guiding principle was that we would have to draw the line in the sand regarding which browsers we'd cover in our test matrix, and instead of risking subjecting users who used unsupported browser to broken experiences then it was preferable that we assured they would experience an old but bulletproof version of it.
We started off by showing a "this browser is not supported, please upgrade" page, until some other department in our company complained up and down the org tree because they used thin clients with outdated browsers. Thus instead of showing a "please upgrade" page we fed the old version, and everyone was happy.
I see how this looks like intentionally feeding a degraded experience to subsets of users, but having been in a decision-making process that led to the same outcome, let me assure you there are real-world scenarios where this outcome does not originate in malice or any ulterior motive.