Are you anthropomorphising companies now? Google the company can't be "out of touch" or "self-important". The engineers maybe, but they don't make PR decisions like this.

In this case the original source is an announcement on a "inside-google" blog, and starts with "Hi Googlers", so the target are clearly mostly Google engineers. It ended up on HN because it was repeated by arstechnica, a respected and well-known portal. And here we are discussing it. So maybe people in fact do care about this?