I'm the one you originally replied to, and yes that's roughly what I'm saying - maybe the individual engineers and designers that built features were trying their best not to be evil, but the company as a whole always had dark motives.

They always funneled user data into ad revenue, always drove people to use their versions of things with overly pushy dark patterns, always collected way more telemetry than necessary.

They bought Android and turned it into a profit center, bought YouTube and have spent basically the whole time making user hostile actions with ad UX and weird algorithms.

Despite individuals' best efforts, I posit that Google the corporation's modus operandi has always been to co-opt good ideas and good people and twist them towards the grey, rarely crossing any defined line but always stretching every one of them to suck more private data, more telemetry, and more ad value.

Just because they invest in an open source programming thing (that gets people to use their platforms and ecosystem for more ad dollars) doesn't make them good.