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The article is about Google being at its best when it had the least competition. You should read it.

It rose to prominence because it was better than its competitors. A perceived lack of competition didn't make it good.

That is exactly the thesis and the point of that whole section! I’m sorry you got downvoted for saying it, perhaps your tone was too blunt.

It’s not that Google was created as a monopoly with no competition — there’s a neat little graph about what happened to Yahoo in there! It’s that the experience of using Google and the Google suite was at its peak in their clear & unchallenged market leader phase.

Source: am author

You say that in a way that suggests that Google being a market leader is what caused or allowed them to develop a peak user experience. To me - and I suspect others too, given the downvotes - this causality is in the opposite direction to what common sense dictates. And simply pointing at the correlation doesn't help prove your case.

To me, it looks like Google achieved a market dominance because they had a great product, but quite quickly they began practising anti-competitive behaviours and before long the user experience began to degrade.

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