That seems a little much; Google has had such a huge number of software employees, that it seems unwise to draw assumptions about everyone based on what I imagine has been a much smaller sample size than the total that you've personally worked with.

I work at one of the big companies and some people do that even here. People just talk about their experience or other systems that they know. It always feels conservative to me, as often it's said to suggest emulating what some other group or company did to solve an often superficially similar problem, but with entirely different constraints. I think some people with certain kinds of thought patterns just pattern match and try to apply past experience a bit too broadly.

Let's hear some examples :)